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Adeline Lubell-Naiman was a close friend of the
Mailer family for over sixty years. She attended Radcliffe with Norman Mailer's
sister, Barbara, and was a good friend of Mailer's first wife
Beatrice Silverman. In 1946, while working as an
editor at
Little, Brown and Company, she convinced Mailer to
submit the first 200 pages of the manuscript of
The Naked and the Dead and championed it
to her publisher. She suggested that historian and critic
Bernard DeVoto read the manuscript and give his
opinion on whether Little, Brown should publish it. He recommended not
publishing and the novel was submitted to
Rinehart, which published the book in
1948. Lubell-Naiman remained close friends with Mailer and
his wives over the years and during the summer of
1968 she played the role of a president of a women's college
in his film
Maidstone. |
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Lubell-Naiman's Norman Mailer collection consists of three folders:
Works and writings, Correspondence, and Clippings. The Works folder contains a
six-page typed transcript of Mailer's speech at the University of California,
Berkeley on May 21, 1965; a copy of a one-page typed sheet titled
"Notes on Maidstone" from Norman
Mailer; and seventeen pages of Lubell-Naiman's handwritten notes on the making
of
Maidstone,
July 18-24, 1968. |
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The correspondence folder contains eighteen carbon copies of
Lubell-Naiman letters to Mailer, dating from
1948 to
1972, and fourteen letters from Mailer to Lubell-Naiman,
dating from
1962 to
1996. Several of Mailer's letters are substantial and
spell out Mailer's views on various literary and personal matters. Also present
is one
1976 letter to
Leonard Fine copied to Lubell-Naiman, and three
letters to Lubell-Naiman from Mailer's secretary, dating from
1965 to
1971. In addition there is correspondence dealing with the
submission of
The Naked and the Dead to
Little, Brown and Company, including a letter from
Mailer to editor
Angus Cameron, several letters from Lubell-Naiman,
and
Bernard DeVoto's evaluation of the novel. |
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The bulk of the clippings folder relates to the making of
Maidstone, but does include some other
clippings on Mailer. |
