Malcolm Jones had best run and hide, for surely Morris and Mailer are climbing out of their graves to avenge the unthinkable blunder of mistaking the Mailer work that cost Morris his job as editor of Harper's. It was "Prisoner of Sex" not "Armies of the Night" with which Morris filled an issue of the magazine - his final issue as editor. I remember this because, working as a newspaper reporter in Iowa at the time, I covered a school board meeting in Muscatine, wbere parents were trying to protect their children from some novel they deemed pornographic. I don't remember the novel, as it was something considerably tamer than "Prisoner of Sex." But the story I filed on that meeting mentioned that a copy of Morris' final issue of Harper's sat in plain view on a rack next to the school board members in the high school library as they discussed banning the book under fire - it might have been "Catcher in the Rye" or something of similar middlebrow notoriety. My only regret is that my story probably prompted the principal to remove the magazine post haste. - Matt Paust
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Norman Mailer, 1923-2007
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So there is no summing up Mailer. There is only contending with him, with what he wrote, the bad and the beautiful and everything in between. He would have had it no other way-you're paying attention to me, right? You can almost hear him laugh. He delighted in contradiction, but really he couldn't help it. It was his genius: to take chances, to change selves, to shuck one identity for another. Every time you thought you had him pegged, he popped out of another hole. There was just no telling. He was brave, he was bold … and he did the crossword puzzle every morning-in pencil. Go figure. But give him the last word on that, on everything, really, from the forward he wrote to an anthology of his own work: "There are only three words to cover this equation: nobody is perfect."
© 2007
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