The Big Bite (Reprint‪)‬

For fourteen months, November 1962 to December 1963, Mailer wrote a monthly column for Esquire on a variety of subjects--television, totalitarianism, the astronauts, the Cold War, dread, architecture, the novels of his contemporaries, U.S. Cuba policy, and the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Hemingway. The most celebrated, his February 1963 column, titled "Ten Thousand Words a Minute," is an account of the first Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston heavyweight boxing match. It is considered to be a foundation stone of the New Journalism. He reprinted these columns, save one, in three of his miscellanies: The Presidential Papers (1963), Cannibals and Christians (1966), and The Idol and the Octopus (1968). The final column, which contains his comments on the August 18, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which he observed (although he missed Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech), is reprinted here for the first time. Why Mailer passed over this column is unknown, especially since his analysis of the meanings of the March is acute and his description of it evocative. His valedictory column ends with the announcement that he is embarking on a serial novel, An American Dream, in the January 1964 issue of the magazine, and doing so in the spirit of Dickens and Dostoevsky. He says that he plans to write the eight chapters in an existential fashion: the first will be published before he has written the third. He kept to this scheme, staying a month or so ahead of deadline, until the final chapter, which arrived late and was 10,000 words longer than planned. Esquire literally held the presses for the August issue and then published a portion of the final chapter in seven-point type. This essay originally appeared in Esquire (December 1963), 22-26. Reprinted with the permission of The Mailer Estate.