2003

The Spooky Art (03.7), edited by Lennon, is published on Mailer’s 80th birthday, and receives a warm reception, the review of Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times being the largest exception. Mailer writes to the publisher of the Times to complain about how her negative reviews of five consecutive books have appeared earlier than almost all other reviews, thus creating a negative atmosphere.

Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings (03.17) is published in early spring, and on 7 April, Why Are We at War? (03.18) a collection of his fulminations against the Iraq War and the presidency of George W. Bush, is published.

In June, he and Lennon begin taping a series of ten conversations about his spiritual beliefs that will later be published as On God: An Uncommon Conversation (07.39).

Following the first meeting of the Norman Mailer Society in Brooklyn, Mailer and Norris entertain all attending at his Brooklyn Heights Apartment.

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  Norman Mailer Provincetown, 2002. Photo by Norris Church Mailer.