92.1

“Mailer’s Many Lives.” Article-interview by Julia Braun Kessler. Life: The World and I, January, 332–339. Mailer comments on Harlot’s Ghost (91.26) in this piece, which contains several errors, the most notable being that Mailer served four years as a rifleman in WWII (he served 25 months in the army); and that The Naked and the Dead (48.2) was accepted by Little, Brown (they turned it down). Mailer says that his

“ own key experiences are exactly what I will not use directly. They can instead form crystals in the mind and the heart so that metaphorically I can shine a light through them. I can get one story if the light points in one direction, and yet another for the opposite. That is why I have always wanted to do books not too near me, books that take me out to distant, alien landscapes, places where I have an insight and where the event can have a life, a psychological reality within my imagination. ”