Remembering a Good Friend

Authors

  • Norman Mailer Author

Keywords:

Robert F. Lucid, memorial address, literary friendship, pedagogy, American literary scholarship, intellectual biography, author–critic relationships, Mailer studies

Abstract

In “Remembering a Good Friend,” Norman Mailer offers a memorial tribute to Robert F. Lucid, delivered for a service held at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2007. Blending personal recollection with intellectual appraisal, Mailer characterizes Lucid as a rare literary scholar whose teaching resisted professional jargon in favor of precision, resonance, and interpretive openness. The piece emphasizes Lucid’s pedagogical philosophy, his influence on generations of students, and his belief in literature as an ongoing encounter with existential complexity rather than a closed system of facts. Through anecdote and reflection, Mailer presents Lucid as a formative presence in American literary culture and as an exemplar of humane, ethically grounded scholarship.

Author Biography

  • Norman Mailer

    Norman Mailer (1923–2007) was one of the most influential and contentious American writers of the postwar period. A novelist, journalist, essayist, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Mailer emerged with The Naked and the Dead (1948), a landmark World War II novel, and went on to produce a body of work that consistently tested the boundaries between fiction, history, and reportage. Central to the development of what came to be called New Journalism, his nonfiction works include The Armies of the Night (1968), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Executioner’s Song (1979), which earned a second Pulitzer. Across genres, Mailer’s writing confronts power, violence, masculinity, politics, and the American imagination with sustained ambition and formal experimentation.

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Published

2026-01-25

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2007): Inaugural Issue

Section

Works by Norman Mailer