Norman Mailer, Dies at 84
From the New York Times
Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation, died early yesterday in Manhattan. He was 84.
The cause was acute renal failure, his family said.
Mr. Mailer burst on the scene in 1948 with “The Naked and the Dead,” a partly autobiographical novel about World War II, and for six decades he was rarely far from center stage. He published more than 30 books, including novels, biographies and works of nonfiction, and twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for “The Armies of the Night” (1968), which also won the National Book Award, and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979).
He also wrote, directed and acted in several low-budget movies, helped found The Village Voice and for many years was a regular guest on television talk shows, where he could reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.
Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
He was also the least shy and risk-averse of writers. He eagerly sought public attention, and publicity inevitably followed him on the few occasions when he tried to avoid it. His big ears, barrel chest, striking blue eyes and helmet of seemingly electrified hair — jet black at first and ultimately snow white — made him instantly recognizable, a celebrity long before most authors were lured out into the limelight.
At different points in his life Mr. Mailer was a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent of women’s liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing. Boxing obsessed him and inspired some of his best writing. Any time he met a critic or a reviewer, even a friendly one, he would put up his fists and drop into a crouch.
You can read the rest of this extensive expose’ HERE
November 12th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Put your hands together for Norman Mailer, folks: he talked big and wrote big and dreamed big and (more often than not) failed big. But he had courage and chutzpah, virtues lacking from the contemporary literary scene and its timid, faceless scribblers.
He wasn’t afraid to play the part of clown, boor, buffoon…as long as it drew more interest and readers to his work. NAKED AND THE DEAD still packs enormous power after all these years–I dare you to read it (or re-read it). It is a cynical, nihilistic book, vicious and uncompromising, a novel of remarkable skill and maturity (considering he was only 25 when he wrote it). Mailer dared to be great, to rise above the common herd. He made not have quite made it, but he gave it his best shot. For that he is to be congratulated and respected…