nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
Bob Begiebing, April 19, 1989

19 April 1989
Dear Bob,
I only had time to read through quickly the
section you devoted to "Ancient Evenings" in your
new book, but must say it seems to me the best thing
I've read so far on that weighty tome and I was pleased
at the thoroughness and insight, and--dare I say it?
the understanding you brought to it. It's a damned good
piece of work, and if I have the time, I'm going
to give Fowles and Gardner the same consideration I
gave myself (don't count on that).
I'll be on the Cape this summer 627 Commercial
Street in guess which town. If youMailer added “are” here by hand. please get in
touch. This time we will get together and break bread.
Over July and August you can reach me at 508-487-2136.
::::::::::Cheers,
::::::::::Norman
::::::::::Norman Mailer
Bonnie Culver

’s twenty plus plays have been produced nationwide in community theaters, colleges, universities, regional theaters, and New York City. Her one-woman show A Ticket to the Circus, based upon the memoir by Norris Church Mailer, is scheduled for streamed productions in May, 2022 and live performances in the fall at the Edgemar Center for the Arts, starring Anne Archer directed by Michelle Danner. She has had three screenplays optioned, including Raining Rainbows by Solo One Productions, Marlee Matlin’s film development company. In 2020, she was named professor emerita at Wilkes University where she served as the co-founder and director of the Maslow Family Graduate Creative Writing Program, a former dean, and Associate Professor of English.
Category:Contributors
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C. Dean Pappas

, M.D. is a retired physician, with a specialty in Laboratory Medicine and Pathology. Previously, he was Chairperson of a 5 person hospital based group in the greater Boston area and Associate Clinical Professor of Pathology at Tufts University, Boston. He and wife Denise Pappas are long-standing Provincetown, MA summer residents and members of the Norman Mailer Society.
Category:Contributors
Category:2018 Conference
Carol Dine

Carol Dine is the author of four books of poetry and a memoir, “Places in the Bone,” soon available on Kindle from Lincoln Square Books. She is a recipient of the Sword of Hope Award from the American Cancer Society and the Editor’s Choice Award from Ekphrasis/Frith Press, as well as grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the St. Botolph Club Foundation and the Bitter Oleander Press. Carol has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony. She teaches memoir at Massachusetts College of Art & Design.
Category:Contributors
Carol Holmes Alpern

was introduced to Mailer’s writing by Robert F. Lucid when she was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964. In July 1969, while Mailer was in Florida covering the moon shot, she and Lucid went to the Columbia Heights apartment and a warehouse in Manhattan and worked on the beginnings of the archive that is now housed at the Ransom Center. She and Mailer began corresponding in April 1970. Their friendship and correspondence continued until his death. Carol dropped out of academic life in the mid-1970s and worked instead as an editor and proofreader. She is a lifelong Quaker, has held leadership positions in the Religious Society of Friends, the Council of Churches of the City of New York, and served on the board of Friends United Meeting and the advisory board of Earlham School of Religion. She has written for Quaker Life magazine and reviewed books for Harper’s and the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin. Her forthcoming memoir Choosing Miracles: A Chronicle of Voices, Visions, Angels, and Quakerism is dedicated to the memory of three of her mentors: Morse Peckham, Leslie A. Fiedler, and Norman Mailer. She suspects Norman would hate the book.
Category:Contributors
Category:2019 Conference
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Charles Schultz, February 17, 1964

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York
::::::::::::::::::::February 17, 1964
Dear Mr. Schultz,Schultz was an official with the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences who invited Mailer to take part in a forum discussion.
Normally I think I would want to say yes to your invitation for the Forum, but since it falls on March 12, which is three days after I’ll be handing in my next installmentThe sixth installment of AAD. of my novel to Esquire, I can know to a certainty that it will be impossible to prepare anything for the Forum or even think constructively in advance about what I would like to say and what my ideas might really be. So for that reason, most regretfully, I’m afraid I must decline.
::::::::::::::::::::Yours sincerely,
::::::::::::::::::::Norman Mailer
===Notes===
Charles Schultz, February 17, 1964,

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York
::::::::::::::::::::February 17, 1964
Dear Mr. Schultz,Schultz was an official with the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences who invited Mailer to take part in a forum discussion.
Normally I think I would want to say yes to your invitation for the Forum, but since it falls on March 12, which is three days after I’ll be handing in my next installmentThe sixth installment of AAD. of my novel to Esquire, I can know to a certainty that it will be impossible to prepare anything for the Forum or even think constructively in advance about what I would like to say and what my ideas might really be. So for that reason, most regretfully, I’m afraid I must decline.
::::::::::::::::::::Yours sincerely,
::::::::::::::::::::Norman Mailer
===Notes===
Christopher Hitchens

was an English-born American author, journalist and literary critic. He has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, and a variety of other media outlets. He is a political commentator and intellectual. He has authored, co-authored, edited and co-edited numerous works. His recent work, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), was nominated for a National Book Award in 2007.
Category:Contributors
Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)
Christopher Ricks

is Warren Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director
of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. He was formerly King Edward
VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge. For the usual term of
five years (from 2004), he is the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He has written
books on Milton, Keats, Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, Beckett, and Bob Dylan,
and he has edited the poems of Tennyson, the early unpublished poems of
Eliot, and The Oxford Book of English Verse. It moved him no end when the
publishers of The Executioner’s Song reprinted in full, from the London Review of Books, his tribute to the masterpiece.
Category:Contributors
Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)
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Clarence Wolfshohl

is professor emeritus at William Woods University. He has been active in the small press as writer and publisher for over fifty years, publishing poetry and non-fiction in many journals, both print and online, including New Texas, San Pedro River Review, Agave, Cape Rock, and New Letters. Among his publications are the e-chapbook Scattering Ashes (Virtual Artists Collective, 2016), the chapbook Holy Toledo (El Grito del Lobo Press, 2017), Queries and Wonderments (El Grito del Lobo Press, 2017), and Armadillos & Groundhogs in late 2019. Wolfshohl lives in the suburbs of Toledo, Missouri, with his cat.
Category:Contributors
Category:2021 Vol. 15 (MR)
Colum McCann

is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and now lives in New York. He is a Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College, New York. McCann’s work has been published in over 40 languages and has appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, and other international publications. McCann is the author of seven novels, including TransAtlantic (2013) and the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin (2009). He has also written three collections of short stories, including Thirteen Ways of Looking.
Category:Contributors
Category:2017 Conference
Constance E. Holmes

is a Ph.D. student at the University of South Florida
and Assistant Editor of The Mailer Review. A former attorney, she concentrates
in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Film with special interest
in legal rhetoric, depiction of legal events and legal issues in literature and
film, with emphasis on testimony and recollection. In her dissertation she
analyzes these issues in novels by Dreiser, Nabokov, Mailer, and others.
Category:Contributors
Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)
Category:2007 Vol. 1 (MR)
Category:2018 Conference
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D. A. Pennebaker

D. A. Pennebaker is an American documentary filmmaker specializing in popular music and often-controversial political topics. He has directed nearly forty films, ranging from Don’t Look Back (1967) and Monterey Pop (1968), two iconic films of the Woodstock Nation, to The War Room (1993) and The Return of the War Room (2008), dual inquiries into the political dynamics and social change surrounding the Clinton era. Pennebaker pioneered the use of handheld cameras in documentary film, and transformed the resulting wayward images into evocative cultural commentary. He has worked with artists such as Bob Dylan, Little Richard, David Bowie, and John Lennon, and routinely moves from the director’s chair to serve as cinematographer, film editor, producer, and writer. 65 Revisited (2007), assembled from rare Dylan footage and concert outtakes, is available on the recent Don’t Look Back Deluxe Edition DVD.
===Contributions===
Category:Contributors
Daniel Barshay

Daniel Barshay worked as writer in alternative papers such as The Rag, Seed and The Realist. After a career in broadcasting, he lectured at hundreds of school and college settings across the US. Scripting for drama (I Walt Whitman) and film (MOVE: Confrontation in Philadelphia), he is best known as the actor who played the Good Gray Poet in his “Walt Whitman Trilogy” as presented on major stages. The year 2018 will see “COINAGE” launched—a book of new phrases and words of the postwar years presented and described in a fresh format.
===Contributions===
Category:Contributors
Daniel Kramer

Daniel Kramer is a photographer and film director whose portraits and picture stories have been widely published in major magazines, books, album covers and corporate reports worldwide for five decades. His photographs are collected privately and by museums and have been exhibited by such museums as the George Eastman House, The National Portrait Gallery and The Whitney Museum of American Art. His films include documentaries, commercials and educational films. His 1967 book, Bob Dylan, with 140 photographs describes his association with Bob Dylan, and was the first major work about the artist. Kramer’s numerous awards include a Gold Medal from the Art Directors Club of Washington, DC; awards from the Art Directors Club of New York, a Publishers Design Award, an Atlanta Film Festival Medal and a Bob Dylan album cover Grammy nomination. Throughout his career, Mr. Kramer has taught, lectured and conducted numerous workshops and has worked closely with his wife and partner, Arline Cunningham.
===Contributions===
Category:Contributors
Daniela Feliciani

is a Professor of English and American Literature and has taught in Rome and at the University of South Florida. She is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles and of La Sapienza College, University of Rome. She has been a Fulbright scholar. She lectures in Italy and abroad and her poems have been published in numerous anthologies and magazines.
Category:Contributors
Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)
Daniele Pantano

is a Swiss poet and literary translator. He has published over twenty volumes of poetry, essays, and translations, and his poems have been translated into a dozen languages. He is Associate Professor and Programme Leader for the MA Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln. For more information, please visit pantano.ch.
Category:Contributors
Category:2021 Vol. 15 (MR)
Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)
Danielle Mailer

is a graduate of Bowdoin College and has studied at New York Studio School and School of Visual Arts. She has exhibited her art all over the Northeast and has had a solo retrospective at the Mattituck Museum in Waterbury Connecticut. She was also part of a traveling retrospective of Provincetown artists titled “The Tides of Provincetown” at the New Britain Museum of American Art. She is represented by The Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown Mass and the White Gallery in Lakeville CT. In the last decade she has moved into the public art arena and created four larger than life permanent outdoor installations (thanks to state and federal grants) in New York City, Boston and Connecticut. She lives in Goshen Connecticut with her husband, jazz trombonist Peter McEachern and their three adult children who visit often.
Category:Contributors
Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)
David Anshen

is an Assistant Professor of Literatures and Cultural Studies at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He has written on Norman Mailer, Marxism, and Film. His essay on Norman Mailer and Jean Malaquais in included in the upcoming anthology Writers in Context: Norman Mailer published by Cambridge University Press. He is working on a monograph focusing on the politics of Norman Mailer.
Category:Contributors
Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)
Category:2020 Conference
David Mikics

is Moores Distinguished Professor of English and Honors at the University of Houston, as well as a regular columnist for Tablet magazine. His current book project, an appreciation of Norman Mailer the untimely thinker, pays particular attention to Mailer’s friendships with James Baldwin, Diana Trilling, and Jack Henry Abbott. Mikics’s recent books include Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker (Yale UP, Yale Jewish Lives Series), Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Turned Life Into Art (W.W. Norton and Co.) and The Annotated Emerson (Harvard UP). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2017. He lives in Brooklyn and Houston with his wife and son.
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Category:2022 Conference
David Susskind, November 26, 1963

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights	
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York
::::::::::::::::::::November 26, 1963
Dear David,
Thanks for your letter. I must confess that I thought the show was pretty bad while we were doing it, and for the first time in my life I really felt for you, since none of us were doing very much on our own.Mailer appeared on Open End, a television talk show hosted by David Susskind, in early November. To my surprise, the reactions I got were more favorable than almost any show I’ve been on. How odd is audience reaction. Actually, David, if you’d like to invite me back, there’s one show and one show only I’d really like to do right now. And that is a mano a mano with Bill Buckley, just you, me, and Old Bill. I think I could take him over two hours, and take him good, but win lose or draw it could be an exciting show. There is interest in the two of us as opponents. Our debate in Chicago for instance was a sell out in Medinah Temple, and grossed $8000.He debated William F. Buckley, Jr. in Chicago on 22 September 1962 on “The Role of the Right Wing.” The debate transcript was published first in Playboy (February 1963) and later in The Presidential Papers. Mailer sometimes drafts his letters in pencil, sometimes dictates them, and sometimes uses a tape recorder. His secretary at the time, Anne Barry, took dictation and then typed the letters for his signature as she found time. The time lag between dictation and typing explains his lack of comment on President Kennedy’s assassination four days earlier, both in this letter and the two preceding.
If you are interested in this, we’ll have to pick the time most carefully, because I’m deep in work this winter and doing a novel in serial in Esquire, and my deadlines fall each month between the 9th and the 15th. Which means that the only time I can afford to take off a few days and get ready would be in the week after I hand in a particular installment.
::::::::::::::::::::At any rate, best for now,
::::::::::::::::::::Norman
===Notes===
Deborah Martinson

’s research in auto/biography and fiction informs her
research and her teaching. Her books focus on personal, historical and political
contexts: Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (2005), In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction (2003) and recently completed Virginia Durr: Southern Radical Come Hell or High Water, a life of the white Alabama civil rights leader. Martinson was an Associate Professor of English Writing at Occidental College in Los Angeles until her death in 2014.
Category:Contributors
Category:2008 Vol. 2 (MR)
Denise Pappas

is a lifetime member of the Norman Mailer Society where she enjoys engaging with its informative, opinionated and intelligent speakers and members. She is the author of John Simmons: The Measure of a Man, the biography of John Simmons, founder of Simmons College in Boston where she is a Trustee Emerita. Denise has also written a family memoir Holy Unholy and as a board member of Provincetown ARTS she writes book reviews for the magazine. She also studied biography at the Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony.
Category:Contributors
Category:2021 Vol. 15 (MR)
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Diana Athill, August 21, 1964

::::::::::::::::::::597 Commercial Street
::::::::::::::::::::Provincetown, Massachusetts
::::::::::::::::::::August 21, 1964
Dear Diana,
Just the briefest of notes—I’m racing through the mail today, but wanted to tell you that I was delighted you liked the book, and will go through your criticisms along with the ones I received from Dial in the next few weeks, for I plan to have the book in final shape by—at the latest—the middle of September, and hope actually to be ready to go by September 1. In fact the only thing I don’t agree with you about is glens and dells. I thought somehow it was right for KellyKelly is Barney Oswald Kelly, Deborah’s father and Rojack’s nemesis in the novel. Mailer had chosen Kelly’s name, which eerily echoes that of Lee Harvey Oswald, at least two months before Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby. Mailer continues to believe that the similarity in the names may be more than a coincidence.—at least I could hear his voice.
I’m working very hard this month on a long piece about the Republican Convention.Mailer did not revise the serial version of AAD as quickly as he had hoped. He worked on it through the summer and early fall of 1964 in Provincetown, putting it aside for the “long piece” he wrote about the August Republican Convention. Titled “In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964,” it appeared in the November issue of Esquire. I was out in San Francisco for the week and since coming back have done just about nothing else. The result is a long piece, 21,000 words, which were very different from the piece on Kennedy and the Democrats, and may have turned out about as well—at least I hope so. My agent wants to try selling it to a British newspaper or magazine as well as Esquire. How about The Observer? They’ve approached me in the past.
Incidentally, my folks were delighted with the good care you took of them, and I know appreciated it more than a bit. I don’t think the hotel bothered them too much. At a certain point I turned to my mother and said, “Well, after all, you certainly were the youngest girl there,” and she gave her full laugh, and her eyes turned very merry for a moment.
All else is well, except for the photograph in The Observer. Were you able to obtain prints of it? I really think I’d like to use it for the book, at least for the American edition. If it proves to be one of those little things which are enormously complicated, then I wouldn’t want time to be taken on it. After all, one can always get a good photograph if one takes a haircut.
::::::::::::::::::::Excelsior,
::::::::::::::::::::Norman
P.S. Dictating this to Anne, A.B. remarked, “But perhaps the letter was lost in the mail stroke.” Is that possible?
===Notes===
Diana Athill, February 25, 1965

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York
::::::::::::::::::::February 25, 1965
Dear Diana,
The jacket aroused my fury on two counts.Mailer’s extreme dissatisfaction with the dust jacket of the Deutsch edition may have led to the elimination of “the gentlemen in the car wreck” (one half of the painting) from the back of the dust jacket of the British book club edition that followed the Deutsch edition. 1) The girl on the cover doesn’t bear the remotest resemblance to Deborah, Cherry, or even Ruta. The result, so far as I am concerned, is that people will be imagining a woman who does not correspond to any of the women in the book. You know, when you spend a lot of time working on a character, trying to etch their outlines clearly, it’s not agreeable to see the work overturned by a gimmick. I really wish I’d been consulted on the jacket.
Which brings me to the second point. 2) I don’t mind not having a photograph of myself on the book, but the gentleman in the car wreck on the back of the jacket is unmistakably a dog-faced version of this particular pen. Now Diana, I need that about as much as you do. 3) (I find there’s a third objection after all) That is the value of the jacket altogether. It’s a most interesting painting, not terribly good, not altogether good, not altogether bad, but it manages to indicate symbolically just about every element of the book, which means that people are going to be picturing the book through the artist’s eyes as much as through mine, and that’s going to result in a doubling of the effect which may prove fatal. It’s one thing for me to create an atmosphere of horror, it’s another to drench the reader in a state of horror before he begins to read the book. If you’re going to dare playing an entire composition in the key of C, it’s not necessarily wise to strike thirty chords in the key of C before you begin. Now I grant you the jacket is the first of it’s kind, etc., etc., and I’m sure that everyone in the book industry will notice it, and people in the book stores will notice it (of course if they do not look closely they will think it is the jacket of a paperback book) but what the jacket will not accomplish is a deepening of respect for the qualities of the book and that I insist is the single factor which will prove fatal. To push a novel by Norman Mailer as a best seller can only draw the wrath of the critics. Get a string of bad reviews, and you’re dead. This has been my argument from the beginning. It has not been listened to and I just [think] you’re all not dead wrong, though certainly I think you are.
Now one thing I must insist on. I want the photograph which Anne Barry took of me to be the sole photograph released for publicity. It’s a picture which in my opinion fits the book more closely than any other photograph I’ve ever had taken, and for that reason I want no other.
Best for now, Diana, and we’ll talk about my visit after we’ve cleared the air a little on these matters.
::::::::::::::::::::Norman
===Notes===