84.6

“Mailer Presides over a Novel Launching.” Article-interview by John Blades. Chicago Tribune, 31 May, Sec. 5, p. 9. Longer report on the Washington, D.C. dinner for book editors given by Random House to promote the forthcoming Tough Guys Don’t Dance (84.17). Mailer reports that he was “shocked” that Little, Brown, to whom he owed a book under a previous contract, didn’t like 84.17; Random House took it over as the first book under its new contract with Mailer. Mailer says he would like “to write a western as good as Ed Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times and Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident,” but not a romance, because “D.H. Lawrence did it all when it came to romance.” See 84.5, 84.8, 84.30.