1963

On March 10, he is introduced to actress Beverly Bentley by his boxing friend Roger Donoghue at P.J. Clarke’s restaurant in New York. He marries her on 29 December in his Brooklyn apartment, after divorcing Jeanne Campbell in Juarez, Mexico on 16 December.

His second miscellany, The Presidential Papers (63.37), ostensibly advice for President Kennedy, is published on 8 November. The photo on the back of the dust jacket shows Mailer sitting in a J.F.K.-style rocking chair. It was designed before the assassination, and the chair was airbrushed out when the same photo is used on the cover of the 1964 Bantam paperback edition.

Begins writing a serial novel for Esquire, titled An American Dream (65.7), in which J.F.K. is a minor character.

In 1963, he publishes more than thirty pieces (poems, book reviews, essays, interviews, columns, letters, debates and a short story) in a dozen different places, the beginning of a periodical blizzard that continues unabated until the mid-1970s. Scott Meredith becomes his literary agent in the fall, and successfully negotiates the sale of An American Dream to Dial Press, and the movie rights to MGM.

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  Cover of PP.

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  In Provincetown, 1963.