On Norman Mailer

When we started The New York Review in February 1963 we asked some of the writers we admired most to send us book reviews within three weeks, for no payment, in order, as we said, "to suggest the qualities that a literary journal should have." Norman, whom we all had known in New York, was among the first we turned to, and he soon delivered a review of Morley Callaghan's That Summer in Paris, which he found to be "a modest bad dull book which contains a superb short story about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Callaghan." And by telling that story, about how Fitzgerald, acting as timekeeper in a boxing match, had allowed Callaghan extra time to knock out Hemingway, Norman made a brilliant review out of what he called Callaghan's "dim writing."

When we started regular publication in the autumn, we thought of Norman's acute comments on the novelists of his generation in his Advertisements for Myself, and we sent him Mary McCarthy's The Group, the most controversial novel of the moment, attacked for its frank and copious sexual detail, and the acerbity of her account of the lives of a group of Vassar classmates.

Norman's review is linked below. After forty-five years one can still see why it caused a storm, and was read with great displeasure by Mary McCarthy, who had herself contributed a brilliant article on William Burroughs to our first issue. From then on, Norman was a strong presence in the paper and in our lives, whether in the articles we published about him (some admiring, some, such as Philip Rahv's review of An American Dream, heavily critical) or in powerful articles by Norman himself; the most recent being "The White Man Unburdened," written in March 2003, an excoriating and prophetic reflection on the Iraq war. We present here a selection of articles by and about a writer whose loss we mourn.

—Robert B. Silvers

Selected reviews of books by Norman Mailer

February 15, 2007: Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist
by J. M. Coetzee (on The Castle in the Forest)

October 22, 1998: Beat the Devil
by Louis Menand (on The Time of Our Time)

May 15, 1997: Advertisement for Himself
by Frank Kermode (on The Gospel According to the Son)

June 22, 1995: The Loser's Loser
by Robert Stone (on Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery)

December 5, 1991: Armageddon Now?
by Wilfrid Sheed (on Harlot's Ghost)

April 28, 1983: Norman in Egypt
by Harold Bloom (on Ancient Evenings)

A full list of reviews can be found by searching the archives.

Selected articles by Norman Mailer

July 17, 2003: The White Man Unburdened

December 17, 1998: A Man Half Full
(on A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe)

August 9, 1973: Married to Marilyn

November 2, 1972: The Genius

October 17, 1963: The Mary McCarthy Case
(on The Group)

A full list of Mailer's work in the Review can be found here.