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| PEN Pays Tribute to Norman Mailer |
PEN American Center issued the following statement this afternoon about the death of Norman Mailer. Please join the discussion by sharing thoughts, words, and memories in honor of our colleague who died this week at the age of 84.
November 13, 2007, New York, New York—PEN American Center notes with great sorrow the passing of former PEN president and longtime member Norman Mailer, who served this writers’ organization and the larger world of letters for more than half a century. Mailer was a member of PEN for 56 years, spent 16 years on the Board and four years as a vice president, and was president from 1984 until 1986. Mailer’s leadership played an indispensable role in taking PEN from a small, largely volunteer writers’ group to a professional non-profit organization that speaks with a nationally recognized voice on issues of importance to literature, free expression and the international fellowship of writers.
Norman Mailer was one of the last of a great generation of American writers for whom a life in letters was necessarily lived in the public arena, and who believed that great literary talent entailed a duty to address the great questions of the time. The example of his early leadership in the movement against the Vietnam War—and his remarkable achievement in making great art out of that opposition—inspired the generation that followed. When Mailer later called upon some of America’s—and the world’s—most important authors to come to New York in 1986 to discuss “The Imagination of the Writer and the Imagination of the State,” they came. Mailer had a genius for making people pay attention, and they did.
During that Congress and after, Mailer also reminded us that America needed to pay more attention to writing and writers from abroad. This is a message that seems more urgent today than ever, and one that PEN has renewed with the establishment of PEN World Voices, New York’s first, and America’s only, annual festival of international literature. Like his fellow PEN Board member, Arthur Miller, and his successor as PEN President, Susan Sontag, Mailer insisted on the importance of international literary fellowship in the mission of the organization. We accept this legacy and will remain committed to it.
>> Read the article from The New York Times
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