Word: pen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...series, called the PEN Celebrations, played first at the Booth and later at the Roy ale on Broadway, donated for the purpose by the Shubert Organization. Among the writers who appeared were Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, William Styron, John Updike, Woody Allen and Mailer himself, who agreed to debate sometime Archrival Gore Vidal. Indeed, the Vidal-Mailer matchup was a major draw for the series, and no wonder: their previous encounters have been dramatic, head-butting and drink-throwing affairs. But the latest showdown was disappointing. "A meeting between two toothless tigers," Mailer called...
BOOKS: In New York City, the 48th PEN Congress generates heat and light...
...January. The winter's coldest weather to date arrived with the delegates and guests. Central Park was a dismal filigree of naked branches; from hotel windows, the frozen ponds looked like the eyes of dead fish. And then there was the theme of the 48th annual congress of International PEN: "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State." PEN, founded in 1921, is an organization of poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists. Almost any of its 10,000 members worldwide, it would seem, could invent a more inviting topic for discussion. But none did, and initial expectations were...
...prepared for an exciting surprise. In a brilliant end run that assured world attention, American PEN President Norman Mailer asked Secretary of State George Shultz to deliver the gathering's opening address. Unfortunately, the novelist did not notify the PEN board of directors, who were dismayed when they learned of the invitation. Many of them objected to a high-ranking representative of the U. S. Government speaking to American PEN, a group that loudly guards its independence from official censure or sanction. Said Susan Sontag, a prominent intellectual at the congress: "We have to as writers set ourselves in opposition...
...Mailer's action was not reversible; once invited, the Secretary could not be uninvited. That was hardly the end of the matter, though. The day before Shultz was scheduled to appear, Novelist and PEN Board Member E.L. Doctorow protested in the New York Times: "It is more than a shame--it verges on the scandalous--that those in stewardship of American PEN and the conference should have so violated the meaning of their organization as to identify it with and put itself at the feet of the most ideologically right-wing Administration this country has seen...