Honoring Mailer's Legacy

The inaugural Norman Mailer Writers Colony gala and benefit this Tuesday features a pride of literary lions, including Toni Morrison and Joan Didion. Colony co-founder Lawrence Schiller on the author’s final wish.

On Tuesday night in Manhattan, a group of the country’s most acclaimed writers will gather to celebrate the first year of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony—a new residency program based out of the late author’s Provincetown, Massachusetts, home. The gala—which will be chaired by Daily Beast Editor in Chief Tina Brown and New Yorker Editor in Chief David Remnick—boasts a guest list that reads like a who’s who of American letters, including Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Jeffrey Eugenides, Simon Schama, Robert Hughes, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Kennedy, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie, Gay Talese, and Don DeLillo—all coming together to honor the memory of Mailer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a lion of narrative nonfiction.

Click Image to View Our Gallery of Norman Mailer and the Writers Colony

During the benefit, the first-ever Norman Mailer Awards will be presented to Toni Morrison and the late David Halberstam, best known for his early reporting on the Vietnam War—Morrison will receive the award for Lifetime Achievement and Halberstam for Distinguished Journalism. The colony’s mission is to recognize the greatest of American writers while fostering the next generation, from high-school students and beyond, just as Mailer held an active dialogue with his peers and also mentored many young writers during his life.

The colony, which was open this year for the first time from May through September, hosted seven Mailer fellows (selected from 500 applicants), and 42 more aspiring writers and journalists for workshops ranging from biography to memoir to historical narrative. The project is the brainchild of Lawrence Schiller, Mailer’s longtime friend and collaborator, who noted that “Norman had helped hundreds of writers over the years, reading and commenting on manuscripts, sending many to his agents and publishers, and answering questions in letters and giving advice on a writer’s life.” After Mailer passed away in 2007, both Schiller and Mailer’s wife, Norris Church Mailer, decided that a colony was “exactly what the house should be.”

Below, read Lawrence Schiller’s memories of Mailer’s final days, and the story of how the colony came to be, and view a gallery of images from Provincetown over the years, from Mailer’s residence to its current state as a center for creative endeavors.

In 2001, when we were in Moscow together working on a book, my friend Norman Mailer and I often talked about dying. One night Norman was in the kitchen of a friend’s apartment, in an undershirt, cooking, and I was alone, sitting across from him, waiting for dinner. “If I die before you,” I said, “will you be there for [my wife] Kathy? She may need someone like you.”

“You’re not going to die before me,” Norman replied. “I’m older and lived a harder life.”

“No,” I said, “That harder life has made you more fit.”

“And what if I die before you?” he asked me.

“Well I’ll do what needs to be done at the time”.

Norman just looked at me and smiled and went back to cooking pasta.

When I last visited Norman in 2007, he knew that he was dying and that he would not live out the year. He died on November 11, in New York City, and was buried at the tip of Cape Cod, in the Provincetown cemetery. That same evening, at Norman’s home, I was talking to our mutual friend Hans Janitschek.