Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer, author of such books as “The Naked and the Dead” and “The Executioner’s Song,” died Saturday in New York. He was 84.
According to the Associated Press:From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as “The Armies of the Night,” Mailer always got credit for insight, passion and originality.
Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old “enfant terrible.”
Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, street-wise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.
He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women’s liberation.
But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, “In the end, it is the writing that will count.”
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