“Proceeds from the birthday part were said to be destined for 'the Fifth Estate,' an organization, or foundation, or publication, or something, anyway, about which no one seemed to know much.”

“Mailer said he wanted to establish something he called 'the Fifth Estate,' essentially an organization to investigate whether the United States was slipping into totalitarianism through a series of carefully manipulated conspiracies. He said it was the best political idea he ever had”

“Kerouac and Mailer have long been literary brothers, even if under each other’s skin. Which one founded the Beat Generation and which one merely found it is just a matter of semantics”

“Dear reader, we begin a collaboration, which may go on for three weeks, three months, or, Lord forbid, for three-and-thirty years. I have only one prayer — that I weary of you before you tire of me”

“In America, poetic truths have real-life con­sequences, and Mailer is one of the few American intellectuals to perceive this fact as both fundamental and fundamentally good”

“The new paternalists really think, it seems, that their utterances of the oldest racial cliches are, somehow, a demonstration of their liberation from the hanky-panky of liberalism and God knows what else”

“The play entertains the forbidden nightmare of the liberal: what, dear Lord, if the reactionary is correct, and people are horrible. Yet, with the same breath, it is revolutionary”

Fifty years ago the Voice profiled the legendary actor, who died July 9, at the age of 88

A special supplement — with selections from 30 years of the Voice — dedicated to the artists of Off-and Off-Off-Broadway.

“Mailer said at one point that it was necessary to forge a ‘hip coalition of the right and the left’ ”