Encounters with Mailer

Authors

  • Andrew Gordon University of Florida Author

Keywords:

literary encounter, public speaking, campus literary culture, literary reputation, writers and politics, boxing and masculinity, American literary memoir

Abstract

Norman Mailer spoke to a crowd at the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1972, toward the end of the Nixon-McGovern campaign. It was a memorable evening, raucous and rowdy, as his speech was heckled and disrupted frequently. In 1986, Mailer came to the University of Florida in Gainesville in February 1986 to give a talk entitled “The Art of Writing.” In 1972, it was one of the tempestuous Nixon years: the Vietnam War was still raging, the country was facing an election, and Mailer confronted vociferous protesters. In contrast to that wild evening, by 1986 it was the quiescent Reagan era, the tranquilized Eighties. The times were tamer, and Mailer too had aged and mellowed.

Author Biography

  • Andrew Gordon, University of Florida

    Andrew Gordon is Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Florida, author of An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP/Associated University Presses, 1980), as well as Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg, and, with Hernan Vera, Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. He has written many essays on Jewish-American authors, including Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and Ozick. But his main claim to fame is that he is the only literary critic known to have smoked dope with Thomas Pynchon.

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Published

2026-03-25

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2010): Literary Warriors

Section

Articles