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The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/Introduction to Taschen Edition of Superman Comes to the Supermarket (view source)

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{{DISPLAYTITLE:Introduction to Taschen Edition of ''Superman Comes to the Supermarket''}}
{{DISPLAYTITLE:Introduction to Taschen Edition of ''Superman Comes to the Supermarket''}}
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{{byline|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael}}
{{byline|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael|abstract=An introduction to the recent Taschen book-length version of Norman’s Mailer’s classic 1960 ''Esquire'' essay on JFK, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.”|url=https://prmlr.us/mr15lenn}}
 
{{abstract|An introduction to the recent Taschen book-length version of Norman’s Mailer’s classic 1960 ''Esquire'' essay on JFK, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.”}}
 


On November 3, 1960, five days before John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency by less than one percent of the popular vote, Norman Mailer wrote to Kennedy’s wife Jacqueline. He was replying to her letter thanking him for his extraordinarily favorable report on her husband’s campaign, an essay (published in ''Esquire'' magazine three weeks before the election) titled “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Mailer had depicted the campaign as the outcome of a dramatic morality play rather than as a realignment of voter preferences based on demographics and party promises. JFK was “a prince in the unstated aristocracy of the American dream,” while Nixon was described as “sober, the apotheosis of opportunistic lead.” Kennedy would win, Mailer predicted, because the nation was eager for change after eight dull, dispiriting years under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. There was a “subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires” in the American psyche that Kennedy, a war hero with a Hollywood star’s glamour, seemed ready to engage. Looking back many years later, Mailer said, “The country began to speed up, the sexual revolution began with Jack Kennedy . . . things began to open up.”
[[File:JFK1.jpg|thumb|From the Taschen edition of ''Superman Comes to the Supermarket''.]]
[[File:JFK1.jpg|thumb|From the Taschen edition of ''Superman Comes to the Supermarket''.]]
On November 3, 1960, five days before John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency by less than one percent of the popular vote, Norman Mailer wrote to Kennedy’s wife Jacqueline. He was replying to her letter thanking him for his extraordinarily favorable report on her husband’s campaign, an essay (published in ''Esquire'' magazine three weeks before the election) titled “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Mailer had depicted the campaign as the outcome of a dramatic morality play rather than as a realignment of voter preferences based on demographics and party promises. JFK was “a prince in the unstated aristocracy of the American dream,” while Nixon was described as “sober, the apotheosis of opportunistic lead.” Kennedy would win, Mailer predicted, because the nation was eager for change after eight dull, dispiriting years under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. There was a “subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires” in the American psyche that Kennedy, a war hero with a Hollywood star’s glamour, seemed ready to engage. Looking back many years later, Mailer said, “The country began to speed up, the sexual revolution began with Jack Kennedy . . . things began to open up.”
Mailer told Mrs. Kennedy that he was troubled by her husband’s disapproving, bellicose comments about Fidel Castro, who had just seized power in Cuba, but would nevertheless vote for him because “it is more important than ever that he win.” It was the first vote Mailer had cast for a president since 1948 when he campaigned for third-party candidate, Henry Wallace, who ran a distant third to Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey. The Kennedy mystique drew Mailer back into mainstream politics, and his essay became one of the earliest exemplars of the “New Journalism” (along with the work of Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe, among others), a new kind of writing that moved the observer onto the stage of the story. During the previous decade, Mailer had eschewed any part in conventional politics in favor of a frenetic, controversial role in the New York ''demimonde'', where he extolled marijuana, jazz, sexual freedom and celebrated the disenthralled lifestyles of African Americans in magazine essays and columns in the ''Village Voice'', a weekly Greenwich Village newspaper that he co-founded and named. Bored and depressed by the kneejerk patriotism and family pieties of the tranquillized Eisenhower era, and oppressed by “the corporations, the FBI, the CIA, and the Mafia . . . working in an overt and covert association,” Mailer saw Kennedy’s election as “the hairline split in the American totalitarianism of the fifties.” With the 43-year-old president and his elegant, cultured wife in the White House, politics had become exciting. In his speech accepting his party’s nomination, Kennedy spoke of America as a “new frontier,” a place of “unknown possibilities and perils.”
Mailer told Mrs. Kennedy that he was troubled by her husband’s disapproving, bellicose comments about Fidel Castro, who had just seized power in Cuba, but would nevertheless vote for him because “it is more important than ever that he win.” It was the first vote Mailer had cast for a president since 1948 when he campaigned for third-party candidate, Henry Wallace, who ran a distant third to Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey. The Kennedy mystique drew Mailer back into mainstream politics, and his essay became one of the earliest exemplars of the “New Journalism” (along with the work of Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe, among others), a new kind of writing that moved the observer onto the stage of the story. During the previous decade, Mailer had eschewed any part in conventional politics in favor of a frenetic, controversial role in the New York ''demimonde'', where he extolled marijuana, jazz, sexual freedom and celebrated the disenthralled lifestyles of African Americans in magazine essays and columns in the ''Village Voice'', a weekly Greenwich Village newspaper that he co-founded and named. Bored and depressed by the kneejerk patriotism and family pieties of the tranquillized Eisenhower era, and oppressed by “the corporations, the FBI, the CIA, and the Mafia . . . working in an overt and covert association,” Mailer saw Kennedy’s election as “the hairline split in the American totalitarianism of the fifties.” With the 43-year-old president and his elegant, cultured wife in the White House, politics had become exciting. In his speech accepting his party’s nomination, Kennedy spoke of America as a “new frontier,” a place of “unknown possibilities and perils.”


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