Journalist Michael Wolff claims that Random House has canceled the publication of a planned Norman Mailer essay collection after an objection from a “junior staffer” at the publishing house.
Wolff, citing the author’s eldest son, Michael Mailer, made the claim in a piece for The Ankler, a Substack newsletter founded by columnist Richard Rushfield.
“The back-door apologies at Random House include as the proximate cause—you hardly have to look hard in Mailer’s work to find offenses against contemporary doctrine and respectability—a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, ‘The White Negro,’ a psycho-sexual-druggie precursor and model for much of the psycho-sexual-druggie literature that became popular in the 1960s,” Wolff writes.
The famously abrasive Mailer, best known for The Executioner’s Song, died in 2007 and has long been one of America’s most controversial authors. In 1960, he stabbed his then-wife, nearly killing her, and received a suspended sentence for the assault. He also mounted a quixotic campaign for New York City mayor in 1969, drawing just 5 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary.
The Random House collection was intended to mark the centennial of Mailer’s birth in 1923. The publisher is home to several of Mailer’s best-known books, including The Armies of the Night, The Fight, and Harlot’s Ghost.
Wolff says a Random House source claims that objections from author Roxane Gay led to the publisher’s alleged decision to kill the project, but noted that Gay’s “name however may have been employed as merely a generic type of objector (as in, she or someone equally cause-minded who might object).”
On Twitter, Gay dismissed the suggestion that she was responsible for the project’s cancellation, writing, “It’s so silly. And [some] coward at [Penguin Random House] had the nerve to try and blame this on me, according to Wolff. I’ve never even read Mailer’s work.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
