Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal

The final previously unpublished work from two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the National Book Award, Norman Mailer.

Norman Mailer is one of America's most consequential public intellectuals of the postwar period. He cofounded the Village Voice, and he was the author of twelve novels, among them The Naked and the Dead and Harlot’s Ghost, as well as numerous works of nonfiction. He is truly one of the giants of American literature.

Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal is the only work by Norman Mailer that has not been published previously. Written between 1954-55, from December to March, it contains many ideas he would develop in his later work. The journal includes daily musings, as well as thoughts profound. It is a must-read for Norman Mailer scholars, as well as literature professors.

Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal also includes never before published letters between Robert Lindner (author of Rebel Without a Cause, Prescription for a Reberllion, and The 50 Minute Hour) and Norman Mailer. They introduce the reader to Mailer’s state of mind during the time he was writing the journal and to the unique relationship he had with Dr. Lindner.

Norman Mailer was a giant of American letters and one of our most consequential public intellectuals of the postwar period. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the National Book Award, he was an originator of new journalism and cofounder of the Village Voice. He was the author of twelve novels, among them The Naked and the Dead and Harlot’s Ghost, and numerous works of nonfiction, many probing American politics and society, including The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, and TheExecutioner’s Song, as well as several plays and screenplays. He was also a lifelong activist who ran for mayor of New York City in 1969. He died in 2007.

J. Michael Lennon, emeritus professor of English at Wilkes University and chair of the editorial board of the Mailer Review, is the author or editor of several books about Norman Mailer, including his monumental authorized biography, Norman Mailer: A Double Life; Selected Letters of Norman Mailer; and On God: An Uncommon Conversation, coauthored with Mailer. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, New York Review of Books, New York, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Times Literary Supplement, Provincetown Arts, Hippocampus, and Mailer Review. He teaches in the Maslow Family Graduate Creative Writing Program at Wilkes University, which he cofounded in 2005. He lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

Gerald R. Lucas is a professor of English at Middle Georgia State University, the vice president of the Norman Mailer Society, and the editor of Project Mailer. He co-edited Norman Mailer: Works and Days (2018), serves as the online editor of the Mailer Review, publishes regularly at the intersection of media and literary studies, and is an active Wikipedian. He lives in central Georgia with his wife and two sons.

Susan Mailer is Norman Mailer’s first child. She lived between New York and Mexico during her childhood and adolescence. She attended Barnard College and got an M.A. in clinical Psychology at the National University of Mexico. She trained as a psychoanalyst in Chile at the Chilean Psychoanalytic Association and has her private practice in Santiago where she supervises and teaches.  In 2019 her memoir In Another Place, with and without my father Norman Mailer was published. In October 2022, after self-translating the book, it was published in Chile by Penguin/Random House-Chile. Her psychoanalytic articles have been published in Latin American Journals as well as in the United States. Other pieces have been published by the Norman Mailer Review. She has been on the board of the Norman Mailer Society since 2015.

“Composed as a device for private self-analysis and personal transformation at a time of crisis in Mailer’s life, Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal reveals the sources of Mailer’s public persona, his baroque fluencies, and his themes after the early 1950s. The raw, archival version of this document can be at times embarrassingly revelatory, opaque, and repetitious. But the three editors of this excellent published edition, without censoring Mailer, have created a text that makes widely available the seedbed of all Mailer’s work since 1955—a text that anyone embarking on a serious reading or study of Mailer can't afford to avoid.”
—Robert J. Begiebing, author of Norman Mailer at 100: Conversations, Correlations, Confrontations
 
“Proust said that certain Jews could be both prophet and boor. Mailer amended this description (consciously or not) into prophet and psychopath. Shrewdly edited by J. Michael Lennon, Gerald R. Lucas, and Susan Mailer, Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal offers an abundance of early Mailer soulfulness and introspection: his revisionist ideas of Freudian psychology; his obsession with orgy and murder; his willingness to take every idea to its end; and, for all his fervent explorations, his fundamental logic and artistic responsibility. An important addition to the Mailer canon.”
—David Denby, author of Great Books
 
“Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal offers a rare kind of privileged insight: unprecedented and illuminating access into the psyche of one of America's most complicated and controversial authors during a tortured and formative time in his life. Essential reading for anyone interested in Mailer, or in the workings of an original mind in the throes of experimentation.”
—Maggie McKinley, editor of Norman Mailer in Context: 34 Essays
 
“This long-awaited volume, edited by Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon, Mailer scholar Gerald R. Lucas, and Mailer’s daughter, psychoanalyst Susan Mailer, offers deep insight into the life and thought of a major American writer during a formative period in his life, the 1950s. The editors have done a masterful job of sifting through entries in Mailer’s typed manuscript. The authoritative introduction and the extensive endnotes contextualize Mailer’s exploration of the struggle between his social and instinctual selves. A special feature is the inclusion of correspondence between Mailer and friend psychologist Robert Lindner, author of Rebel without a Cause. Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal represents an invaluable contribution to the future of Mailer Studies.”
—Jason Mosser, author of The Participatory Journalism of Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion: Creating New Reporting Styles