" ... The school received the papers within the last month, said Beth Brainard, spokeswoman for the Harvard library. She said the school pursued the papers because of Mailer's importance as a writer, and because he's a Harvard grad.

"It's important to have Mailer represented in some way in the collection," Brainard said.

Mailer, who died last November at age 84, sold his own archives to the University of Texas for $2.5 million."

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j7yJiWR5CFj8tINFIuRYx_zM6YGAD908725G1

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=803823&forum_id=1#9678219)

By Richard Alleyne

Last Updated: 4:20pm BST 24/04/2008

Norman Mailer, the late giant of American letters, was also a formidable lover, his former mistress has claimed in papers that included accounts of their sex life that in one case stretched to 50 pages long.

Carole Mallory, a former actress and supermodel who had an affair with the six-times married writer for 10 years, has sold seven boxes of documents and photos that include extracts of her own letters, books and journals to Harvard University .

As well as stories hand-edited by the two-time Pulitzer prize winner, the documents also include two sex scenes based on their love life.

One, written as part of an unpublished novel called “When I fall in love”, was composed as a bet with Mailer that she could stretch an account of their lovemaking to 50 pages long.

The other, “Making Love with Norman”, stretches to a more modest 20 pages.

“There’s a long scene in that which is based on our sex life, “ said Mallory, now 66, who appeared in the films The Stepford Wives and Looking for Mr Goodbar.

“Norman dared me to write a 50-page sex scene, and he lost the bet. It’s very steamy. Norman was a real man and he knew what he was doing.”

Mailer, who died last year, was seeing Mallory, 19 years his junior, during his marriage to his sixth wife, Norris Church.

He began by editing the budding writer’s work but, as Mallory explained, the relationship soon deepened.

“We’d have a writing lesson, we’d make love and then go to lunch in whatever order that would be, and I saved all the writing lessons,” said Mallory.

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“I wanted him to teach me to be a writer. He was one of our greatest writers in America.”

Like Mailer, Mallory, who appeared on the front covers of Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Newsweek in the 1970s, has led an eventful life full of highs and lows.

She dated the likes of Warren Beatty, Peter Sellers, Richard Gere and Rod Stewart and was once engaged to Claude Picasso, the son of the Spanish painter.

A recovering alcoholic and self professed “sex addict”, she wrote a semi-autobiographical account of her love life in the 1980s called “Flash”.

At the time, Mailer, who died last November aged 84, described it as “wicked funny and marvellously penetrating”.

Mallory refuses to say how much she was paid for the papers, and Harvard is also silent on the subject.

The former model, who lives in Jeffersonville, Pennsylvania, said she waited to release his papers until after his death out of respect for Mailer and his family.

She said she decided to sell the collection because “I knew they were valuable and I wanted to have some more money”.

The collection also includes photographs, transcripts of interviews with Mailer, and scraps from writing lessons he gave.

Mallory still recalls the principles Mailer emphasized, such as: keep the dialogue punchy; stay away from adverbs; don’t lecture the reader.

“I don’t believe in shame,” Mallory said.

“I believe in making love and love. I’m not going to go around and harbour secrets or shame about ... loving someone. And I don’t think sex is something to be ashamed of.”

Ironically, Mailer, who died in November, was posthumously awarded the “Bad Sex in Fiction” award for “a graphic passage in his novel The Castle in the Forest.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=803823&forum_id=1#9678339)