Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer (Long Branch, New Jersey, 1923 – New York, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, filmmaker and political activist. Writing in English, he belonged to the generation of authors who, after the Second World War, tried to give literary shape to the American experience. He is most associated with the so-called New Journalism, a form that borrows the techniques of fiction to report real events, and he remains a touchstone for anyone interested in where literature and reportage meet.

Raised in Brooklyn by a Jewish family, Mailer entered Harvard in 1939 to study aeronautical engineering, though he soon gravitated toward writing courses. He published his first story at eighteen. Wartime service in the Pacific and the Philippines supplied the material for The Naked and the Dead (1948), the novel that made his name. Afterwards he worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, an experience he later turned into The Deer Park (1955). By his own account, many of his manuscripts were turned down by publisher after publisher before finding a home.

In the mid-1950s he became a controversial essayist. He co-founded The Village Voice in 1955 and wrote pieces such as "The White Negro" (1956), in which he examined violence, rebellion and the unease of American society. His nonfiction peaked with The Armies of the Night (1968), which earned the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. He later won a second Pulitzer, this time for fiction, with The Executioner's Song (1979), a novel built around the final days of the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore. His prose combined ambition with a strong preoccupation with politics, sex and violence, earning him both admiration and fierce criticism. He was also an accomplished biographer, writing about Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso.

Mailer's personal life was as turbulent as his writing. He married six times and had nine children. In 1960 he stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife at a party, and was convicted of assault. In 1969 he ran an unsuccessful campaign for mayor of New York. His coverage of the party conventions and his protests against the Vietnam War made him a steady political chronicler. His support for the parole of Jack Abbott, who was released in 1980 and killed a man soon afterwards, drew lasting criticism.

His legacy lies in the way he fused literary craft with reportage and in the influence he exerted on later writers and journalists. He died in 2007 of kidney failure. His last novel, The Castle in the Forest, appeared shortly before his death and was planned as the first volume of a trilogy.