Norman Mailer: Works and Days/Introduction: Difference between revisions

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Few American writers have had their careers on the minds of contemporary critics and on the anvil of public inspection for such a lengthy time span; none has been so reviled and celebrated in the same and so many seasons. The Mailer record, while sometimes obvious and redundant, has never been fully compiled and therefore never completely relished. Valuable pioneering efforts to compile this record have been made over the years, notably by [[Robert F. Lucid]], Laura Adams and Thomas Fiske. But whenever Mailer sought new opportunities, metamorphosing from novelist into biographer, film director, politician, public intellectual or sports reporter (and always back to novelist), the need for more bibliographic scaffolding became apparent. Because his direction changed so often, because his output has been so prodigious, and because his words have appeared in so many different and often obscure publications, all previous Mailer compilations, including my own, are fragmentary. ''Norman Mailer: Works and Days'' is built upon these earlier efforts and is much indebted to them.

In the wake of Mailer’s death in November 2007, at the age of 84, came an avalanche of eulogies, memoirs and critical estimates, [[Phillip Sipiora]]’s [[Mind of an Outlaw|collection of 49 Mailer’s essays]], [[The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer|my edition of his letters]] (714 out of approximately 45,000), numerous reissues of his books by various publishes, especially Random House, his publisher from 1984 until his death, and my authorized biography, ''[[Norman Mailer: A Double Life]]''. Just weeks before Mailer’s death, the first issue of ''{{MR}}'' appeared. Mailer admired it as he lay dying in a New York hospital. Jointly sponsored by the [[Norman Mailer Society]] and the University of South Florida, this double-issue annual has appeared each fall since 2007. The ''Review'', which contains a broad range of expertly edited essays, reviews, memoirs, documentary material, and a number of heretofore unpublished short works by Mailer, is a major contributor to Mailer’s legacy. This outpouring of all this material, which continues unabated, and the discovery of many new items from earlier years necessitated this expanded and corrected edition of ''Works and Days''.

In a career that stretched over seven decades, Mailer not only published 44 books (including 12 novels), he wrote several plays (and staged them); screenplays (and directed and acted in them); columns and reports for scores of periodicals of every stripe; poems (for both ''Nugget'' and ''The New Yorker'', among others); and essayed every sort of narrative form (including some he invented). He reported on six sets of political conventions (1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, 1996); participated in scores of symposia, appeared and debated hundreds of times on college campuses from the 1950s to the 2000s; delighted and challenged, amused and appalled audiences in numerous venues; and enjoyed a vigorous public and private life in New York, Provincetown, Massachusetts and Mt. Desert, Maine. His passions, feuds, imbroglios, generosities, litigations, embarrassments and loyalties are numerous, notorious and complex. Happily married for over a quarter of a century to [[Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church]], he was wed five times previously and has nine children all told. A stalwart on radio and television talk shows for a half-century, he may have been interviewed more frequently than any other writer. Without being paid for his pains, he has given advice to several presidents, has run for office himself (mayor of New York), served as president of the American chapter of P.E.N., and has won most of the major literary awards except the Nobel. Cofounder of ''[[w:The Village Voice|The Village Voice]]'', he also named it, and was a major player in the effort to break down barriers between popular, underground and elite periodicals. He has written for every kind of periodical: ''Dissent'', ''Ladies Home Journal'' and ''One: The Homosexual Magazine'', ''Parade'', ''Playboy'', ''Esquire'' and ''Vanity Fair'', from ''Way Out'' and ''Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts'' all the way over to ''Paris Review'', ''Commentary'', ''Harper’s'', ''New Yorker'', and ''The New York Review of Books''. Not counting interviews, routine letters to the editor, questionnaires and symposia, Mailer has written for at least 100 different periodicals.

''Works and Days'' is first of all a primary bibliography, one that attempts to be comprehensive. It fails. New Mailer poems, interviews, letters to the editor, and articles with original quotations from him turn up regularly. But the great bulk of significant published items by Mailer, or in which he is quoted, have been located and described. Every named item has been sighted and checked. It is certain, however, that there will be future discoveries.

Each item is numbered chronologically within a year. For example, 87.2 cited above refers to the second item (of 39) in 1987, a 12 January 1987 article-interview by [[w:Dinitia Smith|Dinitia Smith]] that quoted Mailer and appeared in ''New York'' magazine. To the 1110 items in the first edition, approximately 400 new ones have been added to this revised edition of ''Works and Days''. A new item that appears chronologically between two items in the first edition is identified by a letter after the number of the preceding item. For example, [[87.2a]], a 1 February 1987 article-interview in the ''Manchester Guardian'' by Henri Behar, follows the Dinita Smith article-interview, 87.2, noted above. In a number of cases, letters beyond “a” are needed for new items. There are 132 such new items from the years 1941-1998.

Successive variants of an item are named, numbered and the changes described. ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'', for example, is listed twice after its initial [[48.2]] appearance: as [[79.36]] and as [[98.6]]; Mailer added a preface to the 1979 Franklin Library edition of his first published novel, and added another (dropping the first) to the 1998 Henry Holt edition. When an item was collected by an editor before Mailer collected it himself (a common occurrence), the earlier collection is noted, e.g., his essay “[[The White Negro]]” ([[57.1]]) was collected in ''The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men'' before Mailer did so in ''[[Advertisements for Myself]]'' ([[59.13]]).

The continuity of Mailer’s career as a writer has been insufficiently appreciated. The opening lines of scores of articles (often titled “Stormin’ Norman”) and article-interviews present a picture of Mailer as volcano, erupting with spasmodic violence and then subsiding into periods of recovery and apparent dormancy. ''Works and Days'' identifies approximately 1500 links within the sequence of his professional life and suggests, via annotation and cross-referencing, how they cohere into a mesh of craft and intentionality. The cross-referencing is both topical, and also tries to indicate the changes he made as items were revised or augmented. So, for example, Mailer’s theological views, as revealed most notably in several items ([[59.2]], [[75.2]], [[75.11]], [[82.15]], [[83.45]], [[89.11]]), are linked by cross-reference. The entries for his major publications serve as cross-reference hubs: go there first to connect with earlier or later versions of an item. Among the numbered items (”Works”), the life chronology (”Days”), illustrations and appendices, a good deal of what is of interest in Mailer’s life and literary career can be contextualized. Our hope is that anyone interested in his work will find in ''Works and Days'' a solid place to begin.

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[[Category:Works and Days]]