GET ME REWRITE: Norman Mailer is canceled due to lack of interest

 

Just a single selection in the fiction section of Barnes & Noble near West Towne in Madison WI.  The Naked and the Dead, his first book, originally published in 1948.

Photo by Retiring Guy

Of the 89 copies of Mailer's books in LINKcat, a shared online catalog for a consortium of 50 South Central Library System public libraries, only 2 of them are checked out.

LINKcat

What's the point of this exercise? you might be asking yourself.

New York Times, 1/4/2022

The fate of Mailer’s collection, however, generated a heated debate on social media this week, after the journalist Michael Wolff reported in the newsletter The Ankler that Random House had canceled its planned publication of the title because it determined that Mailer — who was famously brash, physically violent, misogynistic and pugnacious in attacking those who disagreed with him — had become too controversial. Citing a Random House source, Mr. Wolff wrote that the publisher was also swayed by “a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, ‘The White Negro.’” 

The Mailer estate was surprised by Mr. Wolff’s claims. “The reasons that were in that piece were news to me,” John Buffalo Mailer said.