Darryl Pinckney on Norman Mailer, America, and Race Politics

1900 University Avenue,Austin TX 78705

20 April, 2023

Description

Darryl Pinckney delivers the keynote address, "Norman Mailer, America, and Race Politics," for the Norman Mailer Society annual conference in Austin in recognition of Mailer's centennial. The Norman Mailer at 100 conference keynote talk will be followed by a reception at the Harry Ransom Center, where the Stories to Tell exhibition includes items from Mailer's archive that highlight three cultural touchstones of his writings: Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and Women’s Liberation. Pinckney's memoir, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan, was published in 2022. A 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, it recounts his friendship and apprenticeship with Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and the introduction they offered him to the New York literary world. Above left, image courtesy Norman Mailer Society. Above right, items from the Norman Mailer Papers on view in the Stories to Tell exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center through August 20, 2023. About the SpeakerDarryl Pinckney was educated at Columbia University. He has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations, and received the Harold D. Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a writer-in-residence at Skidmore College and New York University, an adjunct professor in the writing division of the New School, and a visiting professor at Columbia University, Harvard University, and Yale University. A long time contributor to The New York Review of Books, Pinckney is the author of two novels, High Cotton (1992) and Black Deutschland (2016), and two works of nonfiction essays, "Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature" (2002) and "Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy" (2014). He has contributed to numerous other periodicals, including The Guardian, Harper's, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Slate, TLS, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. His several theatrical collaborations with director Robert Wilson have appeared internationally and at Brooklyn Academy of Music. His most recent book is Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan.