Norman Mailer’s son has denied reports that the late writer has been “cancelled” over his controversialist views.
Earlier this week, the journalist Michael Wolff, author of the Trump White House exposé Fire and Fury, claimed in an article for The Ankler that a planned collection of Mailer’s political writings to mark the centennial of his birth next year had been cancelled by Random House. According to Wolff, one of the reasons for the cancellation was “a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, The White Negro”.
But the New York Times has now reported that the collection, including unpublished writings, has been acquired by Skyhorse, the independent press which also picked up Woody Allen’s memoir after it was dropped by Hachette, and Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth after it was dropped by WW Norton.
John Buffalo Mailer, told the paper that his father’s longtime publisher Random House had declined to make an offer for the book. While he said that “we would have liked to have done this book with them”, he speculated that the publisher turned it down “because this is the first commercial book of Norman’s that’s going to come out in the era we’re living in, and there’s going to be a lot of questions”.
“They didn’t feel they were the right house to do this book right now,” he told the New York Times. “I don’t think they have any interest in trying to cancel Norman Mailer. You can’t cancel Norman Mailer.”
Random House said in a statement that it was “factually incorrect that Random House cancelled an upcoming book of essays by Norman Mailer” and that the book was never under contract. Literary agent Andrew Wylie, representing the Mailer estate, told the New York Times that “Random House is proud to publish Norman Mailer, and intends to promote his work significantly for the centennial, in tandem with the publication by Skyhorse of the anthology”.
Mailer died aged 84 in 2007. He was the recipient of two Pulitzer prizes, for his 1968 account of a peace march on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night, and for his 1979 work The Executioner’s Song, about the life and death of a criminal, Gary Gilmore. Controversial and pugnacious, he was also known for stabbing his second wife Adele Morales with a penknife, puncturing her cardiac sac.