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 over many decades?
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+'''JML''': Well, I’d never thought of myself as an archivist. I never knew much
+about what it entailed. But I found myself, even before I met Norman, collecting virtually every reference to him that I ran across. At first, I bought all
+the scholarly books and essays in journals that I could find. But then, it dawned on me that a lot of the most interesting things he was saying were spoken in public forums, and in interviews and profiles, a lot of it spontaneous, candid, and playful. His 1963 ''Paris Review'' interview with Steve Marcus is still crucial for understanding how he became the kind of writer he was. He said much in that interview that still resonates, his comments about E.M. Forster and the architecture of the novel, for example.
+I began to realize that these public utterances were just as important to
+understanding Norman’s work as the analyses of his work in professional
+journals. I realized that if you wanted to understand Mailer, you had to hear
+him, see him up close, and observe his public speaking off the cuff, where he
+revealed himself in a way that was quite profound. And so I began collecting all those resources, which came at the same time I developed a friendship with his then-authorized biographer, Robert Lucid, a University of
+Pennsylvania professor. I began helping Bob collect manuscripts and materials that were piling up in Mailer’s study, his basement, and in his mother’s
+house.
+Donna and I would go down to New York with our station wagon, fill it
+up with manuscripts, and take them over to the storage vault in New York
+City. We did that for a long time, beginning in the late 1970s. That storage facility, a big steel locker, was about four feet high and ten feet long, and it was
+completely packed. When we didn’t know what to do with all those manuscripts, galleys, letters, research materials, I suggested that we leave the primary resources in storage, and I’d take all of the secondary materials, the
+reviews and interviews and magazines containing pieces on him, quite a pile.
+The primary materials were obviously the most important, including manuscripts that had not been published, marked up galleys, and things like that.
+And Norman’s letters! Boxes of them containing every incoming letter of
+any consequence he’d received from the time he was at Harvard, and carbons
+of all his outgoing letters. We left the correspondence and all of primary
+manuscripts and I took everything else, which was a substantial trove. For
+example, Mailer regularly spoke at colleges and universities, and many other
+symposia and conferences. He would speak on a campus and then the college newspaper would write a story on it, usually with pertinent quotations.
+They would mail a copy to him and he would throw it in a pile and it would
+wind up the archive. Initially, I took all of those materials in order to make
+room, but, really, I wanted to examine, preserve, and mine this material as
+well. In effect, we solved two problems. We began to collect records of the
+public presence of Norman Mailer from local magazines and newspapers
+around the country, and we also created new space for his ever-burgeoning
+primary collection. So, little by little, I became an archivist.
+As I collected, I began to categorize things and organize them chronologically and thematically, putting documents into archival boxes. I was basically
+feeling my way and creating my own referential system. But I didn’t know
+what I was doing. As an aside, I would note that most Ph.D. programs in that
+era offered little in the way of archival instruction. All I knew is that I didn’t
+want to discard these resources, and I wanted to use them in my writing. The
+first journal article on Mailer I published, back in 1977, in  ''Modern Fiction
+Studies'',
+was a survey and analysis of his presence in popular media. Along the
+way I learned, by hook or by crook about archival and bibliographic methods.
+The first book that I did with Mailer grew out of his archive, a 1982 book called
+''Pieces and Pontifications'', which I first suggested to Norman in 1977. It took
+five years to put it together, and my part was selecting and editing 20 interviews with him, which was a great experience. Perhaps, I thought, we should
+also include, in addition to the 20, excerpts from a number of minor interviews in a kind of montage. I argued for doing that for a while, and Norman
+gave it some thought. We finally threw it out the window.
+But then Norman decided to add a dozen essays that he had written over
+the previous decade. He came up with a number of titles, one of which I remember: “After the White Negro.” But after he read the entire manuscript he
+supplied the final title, which I’ve always thought to be wickedly clever. In
+1982, ''Pieces and Pontifications'' became my first book, and that propelled me
+into me collecting materials of all sorts: invitations to publication parties,
+sample dust jackets for his books (Mailer designed many of these), audio interviews, and videos of television appearances, reprints of various essays
+and stories in obscure publications, promo materials from his publishers,
+etc., etc.
+...
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 [[Category:Interviews (MR)]]