What Norman Mailer’s ‘cancellation’ reveals

Recently a story about my father, the writer Norman Mailer, getting ‘cancelled’ tore across the internet. What started the hoopla was Random House, Mailer’s long-standing publisher, suggesting that his estate bring a proposal for a book. The book was to contain excerpts from several of his political writings and interviews in which he presciently laid out the fragility of democracy. The collection was intended to honour his centenary next year.

Random House received the proposal favourably, but then weeks later declined to publish it. The reasons are hearsay. One suggestion is that there were objections by junior executives to the use of the word ‘negro’ in Mailer’s essay ‘The White Negro’. Published in 1957, the essay explored the connection between the ‘psychic havoc’ caused by the atom bomb and the Holocaust to the marginalisation of black Americans in the form of the ‘existential hipster’, the outlaw hero who defied the mind-numbing conformity of the Eisenhower era.