74.7

Excerpts from acceptance speech. The MacDowell Colony: Report for 1973. Mrs. David F. Putnam, Secretary. Published after the 23 January annual meeting, in April or May. A report on the awarding of the Edward MacDowell Medal to Mailer on 19 August 1973 is given on pp. 12–13, including excerpts from Mailer’s acceptance speech: “…So the novelist…is out there…to deal with life as something that God did not give us as eternal and immutable, but rather gave us [as] something half-worked.” Rpt: Mailer gives a slightly longer and somewhat different excerpt from the speech in the preface to Some Honorable Men: Political Conventions, 1960-1972 (76.5). A 120-word excerpt from Mailer’s speech and the bulk of John Leonard’s introduction are reprinted in Medal Day at the Colony, a 1994 booklet published by the Colony. A quarter of a century later, Mailer again drew on his speech for the foreword to The Time of Our Time (98.7). See 73.35.