Norman Mailer has been posthumously cancelled:
Norman Mailer’s long-time publisher has recently informed the Mailer family that it has canceled plans to publish a collection of his political writings to mark the centennial of his birth in 2023, confirms the film producer Michael Mailer, the author’s oldest son. 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.
Mailer’s work will not be any great loss; he is part of the Boomer-era literary decline that saw the elevation of mediocre writers like Bellow, Kerouac, Roth, and Mailer himself at the expense of people who could a) actually write and b) had something to say about the human condition that didn’t revolve around narcissism and sex with mediocre women. But his cancellation is not without significance, as it demonstrates that evil will always cast even its most celebrated servants aside as soon as they cease to be useful.