Lionel Abel
Lionel Abel was a drama professor and critic who wrote for Partisan Review and moved in the same leftist intellectual circles as Mailer.
Lionel Abel was a drama professor and critic who wrote for Partisan Review and moved in the same leftist intellectual circles as Mailer. Mailer’s letter(s) to Lionel Abel appear in Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969 (04.7). Abel’s essay “So Who’s Not Mad?” (1965–66), on Marat/Sade and the turn to the irrational, set “The White Negro” and Rojack, the hero of An American Dream, beside Weiss’s play and Leslie Fiedler’s “The Mutants” as symptoms of the age, and called Mailer “Mindbad.” Mailer’s reply of 28 February 1966 corrected Abel’s “The American Dream” and signed itself “Mindbad.”
Related pages
- Norman Mailer's Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969 | Letter to Lionel Abel (28 February 1966) | An American Dream