Erik Nakjavani
Comparative literature scholar, Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh, and a founding member of the Hemingway Society; a prolific contributor to The Mailer Review (2010–2021) whose essays read Mailer alongside Hemingway, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.
Erik G.R. Nakjavani (1934–2026) was born in Tehran and studied in London and at West Virginia University before earning a PhD in comparative literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He taught comparative literature and French at the University of Pittsburgh for 35 years, first in Oakland and then at Pitt-Bradford, and retired as Professor Emeritus of Humanities. A founding member of the Hemingway Society, he came to Mailer by way of Hemingway, and his work moved freely among literary theory, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. He died in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on 27 September 2026 (obituary, Bradford Era), and the Society posted a memorial inviting remembrances.
Between 2010 and 2021 he published eleven pieces in The Mailer Review, most of them setting Mailer beside Hemingway: on Hemingway’s influence (2010), on Mailer’s and Mary Hemingway’s eulogies (2013), on George Plimpton as a sporting go-between (2012), and on Muhammad Ali and boxing as nonverbal dialogue (2017). He also wrote on Mailer as an intellectual (2015), on Mailer’s reception of 1950s social norms (2016), and a psychoanalytic review of Susan Mailer‘s memoir In Another Place (2019). With Robert J. Begiebing he wrote the Review’s tribute to Andrew Gordon (2017). He gave papers at the Norman Mailer Society conferences of 2015, 2016, and 2019, and attended them for many years.
In The Mailer Review
All are free to read at mailerreview.org.
- “A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer,” 4 (2010) — 2010 bibliography · article
- “The Living George Plimpton: Taking a Sporting Stance between Hemingway and Mailer,” 6.1 (2012): 172 — 2012 bibliography · article
- “Reporting with the Inner Eye: George Plimpton on Writing and Sports,” 6.1 (2012): 191 — 2012 bibliography · article
- “‘Now the Greatest Living Romantic Was Dead’: Norman Mailer and Mary Hemingway’s Eulogies to Ernest Hemingway,” 7.1 (2013): 90 — 2013 bibliography · article
- “Conceptualizing Lived Experience: Norman Mailer as an Intellectual,” 9.1 (2015): 185 — 2015 bibliography · article
- “Norman Mailer’s Reception of Inherited Sociocultural Norms (1950–1960),” 10.1 (2016): 275 — 2016 bibliography · article
- “Norman Mailer on Muhammad Ali: Boxing as Nonverbal Dialogue and the Discourse and Bantu Philosophy,” 11.1 (2017): 157 — 2017 bibliography · article
- “Remembering Andrew Gordon” (with Robert J. Begiebing), 11.1 (2017): 251 — 2017 bibliography · article
- “Theory and Practice of Fictionalized Autobiography: Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro,” 12.1 (2018): 178 — 2018 bibliography · article
- “Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as Bildungsroman,” 13.1 (2019): 189 — 2019 bibliography · article
- “Meditations on Hemingway’s Robert Jordan: An Ontological Democratic Deontology,” 15.1 (2021): 198 — 2021 bibliography · article