Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/386

From Project Mailer

Simply, directly, I excited Stan Rinehart’s anxiety.[1] Dimly, he knew I was the enemy. I was bringing too much too close to him. He wanted me out of the house. No matter the cost. He had to do it because I was threatening him. In the privacy of his thoughts he probably thinks of me as “That son of a bitch Mailer.”



note

  1. President of the firm of Rinehart and Co., Stanley Rinehart Jr. (1897 – 1969) wrote a letter comparing The Naked and the Dead to the work of Hemingway and Dos Passos that was printed on the dust jacket of the first edition. But in late November 1954, with an ad for The Deer Park already published, Rinehart cancelled the novel’s publication after Mailer refused to cut a sexually explicit scene. Later, Mailer sued and received the remainder of his advance for the novel.