The Big Bite

Abstract

Between November 1962 and December 1963, Norman Mailer wrote a monthly column for Esquire covering a wide range of subjects, including television, the Cold War, architecture, U.S.-Cuba policy, and the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway. The most celebrated installment, “Ten Thousand Words a Minute” (February 1963), recounts the first Patterson-Liston heavyweight bout and is regarded as a foundational text of the New Journalism. Most columns were reprinted in three of Mailer’s miscellanies; the final column — an account of the August 1963 March on Washington — appears here for the first time. The valedictory installment also announces Mailer’s serial novel An American Dream, written in the spirit of Dickens and Dostoevsky and published in Esquire beginning in January 1964.