Introduction

Gerald R. Lucas and Matthew S. Hinton introduce this festschrift for Phillip Sipiora, fifteen pieces chosen from the first fifteen volumes of The Mailer Review. Drawing on Mnemosyne as mother of the Muses, Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory,” and the wall of Uruk in Gilgamesh, they argue that keeping memory alive means method rather than reverence, and that Mailer studies came of age under Sipiora’s stewardship when it turned from monument to method. They set out the principles behind the selection and the volume’s five sections.