1965

In January, testifies on behalf of William Burroughs's novel, Naked Lunch, at its Boston obscenity trial.

An American Dream (65.7) (revised) is published on 15 March by Dial Press, where E. L. Doctorow is one of his editors.

Following José Torres’s defeat of Willie Pastrano for the light heavyweight boxing championship on 30 March, Mailer hosts the victory party for him at his Brooklyn Heights apartment. They become lifelong friends and in 1971 Mailer write a preface to Torres’s biography of Muhammad Ali, Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story.

Travels to Alaska in April, where he addresses the Alaskan legislature, speaks at the University of Alaska, and flies over Mt. McKinley in a small plane. His 1967 novel, Why Are We in Vietnam? (67.15) is based on his experiences in Alaska.

On 21 May, speaks against the Vietnam War at the Berkeley campus of the University of California before an audience of over 10,000. In December, he gives a lecture on the state of the novel in the U.S. before a large audience at the Modern Language Association conference at the Palmer House in Chicago.

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  NM in 1965.

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  José Torres in 1965.

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  NM and Ali in San Juan, 1965.