John Buffalo Mailer is a calm, genial, unruffled guy. This might surprise those who envision punch-ups, literary infighting, and general combativeness when they consider his father, Norman Mailer, the grand old pugilist of American fiction, new journalism, and cultural criticism. The current generation’s incarnation of hipster Mailer is an earnest playwright, actor, editor, and activist apparently determined to make a difference in, as well as his own mark on, the world.

At 26, John Buffalo Mailer boasts eight older half-siblings from his father’s five marriages prior to wedding the former Norris Church, a novelist, actress, and John Buffalo’s mother. “There’s no trust fund from my dad because of the nine kids and five ex-wives, but I’m much better for not having one,” said Mr. Mailer, with total sincerity. Of his half-siblings, he said, “We’re all friends, though we’re very different people.” His oldest sister is 55 – the age the elder Mailer was when John Buffalo arrived – while he has a niece only a few years younger than himself. “Everyone’s on great terms. My dad realized late in life the importance of being a parent. He was really ready to be a dad when I was born. I got the best of him, even though it was harder for him to throw a ball around by that time.” Mailer pere did manage to get John Buffalo into the ring for boxing lessons as a child, but it doesn’t seem that the son shares the father’s once-famous proclivity for fisticuffs.

Mr. Mailer grew up between Brooklyn Heights and Provincetown, Mass., and spent a lot of time visiting his maternal grandparents in Atkins, Ark. “My grandfather taught me to fish, shoot, and drive, and the whole experience gave me a real sense of the rural life and the South, something that is kind of lacking these days up North.” He calls his childhood idyllic. “There was a tremendous amount of love around my parents’ house.”

The final two years of high school were spent at the prestigious boarding school Phillips Andover, where his father warned him he would be living and learning with the children of “the people who run the country.” Said Mr. Mailer, “The education, the connections, and the cachet were all a gift, but there is also a responsibility when you get those things.” His college years were spent at Wesleyan University. After graduation and a summer stint as a cowboy-clad waiter – he calls himself “a Jewish cowboy” – in a Santa Fe restaurant, Mr. Mailer moved back to New York City in 2000. Once here, he helped found Back House Productions, a theater company run out of the Drama Book Shop on West 40th Street. In 2002, just as he headed west to Los Angeles to write, act, and look for a legit acting agent, People magazine named him one of the sexiest men alive. Great p.r., yes, but even so he spent eight months in California “looking for a gig. I didn’t book a thing” before returning East.

In the summer of 2003, Mr. Mailer was brought in as part of a new editorial team to relaunch that paragon of American publishing and pot, High Times. Founded in 1974 as a countercultural statement supporting marijuana legalization and challenging the government’s “war on drugs,” High Times evolved, or devolved, as early as the 1980s, into a magazine appealing mostly to marijuana growers and – ahem – green consumers. “The magazine was essentially a trade magazine when we were brought in,” explained Mr. Mailer, “but originally it was a cultural force of liberation in America. It was started as a First Amendment issue, to question drug laws, and it published some great writers and interviews. We wanted to return it to that heyday.” He was hired as executive editor by the new publisher and editor-in-chief, Richard Stratton, one of the magazine’s original founders and a friend of the elder Mailer.

The new High Times lineup lasted just a year. The Stratton team left amicably in August of last year when it became evident that the owners weren’t able to come through with the money to fund the transition to the high-minded (pardon the pun) publication the editors were seeking to helm. “The owners made it seem like more money would be forthcoming, but it wasn’t. We tried to raise the bar in the writing, the art, and the marketing. We tried to move it from a trade magazine to a lifestyle magazine. We tried to make it edgy, badass, alternative, and brutally honest.” High Times has since returned to its previous format.

Mr. Mailer is presently excited about a multimedia entertainment company in the works, American Outlaw Entertainment, to be run by Mr. Stratton, which will develop and produce challenging projects for film and TV, as well as publish a Webzine. Mr. Mailer is particularly fired up about the company’s planned focus on developing scripts by ex-convicts. “It won’t be restricted to prison topics, although you can expect to see the best prison-related material from this company. Anything that fits into the mission statement ‘Celebrate Freedom, Reclaim Patriotism, Break the Laws that Are Wrong’ will be welcome.”

Of late, Mr. Mailer has kept busy working on a proposal for a book about Cheri Honkala, a Philadelphia housing activist Mr. Mailer calls “the homeless Erin Brockovich,” as well as on an independently commissioned screenplay called “Blind,” a love story between a blind man and a socialite. “It is a departure from my usual work in that it is not overtly political, but focuses more on how we deal with loving someone society tells us we cannot.”

Mr. Mailer’s first foray into playwriting was “Hello Herman,” which ran for a month at the Grove Street Playhouse in November 2001. The play’s namesake is an average, modern-day, disturbed American youth, motivated by family traumas and TV violence to try to imitate the Columbine High School killers. Mr. Mailer followed that with “Crazy Eyes,” which the Back House Web site describes as “a comedy/drama about an actor, a day trader, an AIDS researcher, a bag of white powder, and a Palestinian guy who owns a 99-cent store.” “Crazy Eyes” will have its world premiere in Athens, Greece, in April.

While Mr. Mailer doesn’t at first blush seem to exhibit the explosive anger and immense ego that characterized his father’s extraordinarily accomplished and diverse career and life over the latter half of the last century, he certainly shares his father’s taste for intellectual, political, and artistic provocation. “There are pros and cons to being Norman Mailer’s son,” he confided, “but I think they even out, with the pros outweighing the cons. He’s a giant, but I’m not trying to compete with my father and that possibility is out there. And not everybody gets major newspapers reviewing their first play. … If I can generate more awareness about people like Cheri Honkala, there’s no way I’d rather call in that chip.”