BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY OF A FAMOUS AQUARIUS: NORMAN MAILER

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer died Saturday (Nov. 10, 2007) at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. The cause was renal failure, said J. Michael Lennon, his literary executor. Mailer was 84.

He was born Norman Kingsley Mailer on January 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey. Mailer grew up in Brooklyn, excelled in the sciences in school, and majored in engineering at Harvard (1943 BS), but having written short stories and a novel before graduation, he was already committed to writing.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army (1944–6) and volunteered for combat in the Pacific. After the war, he enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris (1947–9) to take advantage of the GI Bill while writing.

Mailer became an overnight sensation with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), which at the time seemed rather shocking in its portrayal of men at war. His next two novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and Deer Park (1955), pleased neither critics nor readers, and he turned to expressing his increasingly more extremist social and political philosophy in magazine essays that were eventually collected in volumes such as Advertisements for Myself (1959) and Cannibals and Christians (1966).

After his novel The American Dream (1965) was generally dismissed as too outré for realistic Americans, he tended to concentrate on non-fiction works in which he impressed his own self onto public events or into others' lives, from the journey to the moon (Of a Fire on the Moon, 1970) to Marilyn Monroe's life (Marilyn, 1973).

Meanwhile, his real-life activities and persona would often threaten to overwhelm his literary career, as he seemed to be constantly engaged in verbal quarrels with people such as Gore Vidal, in divorce proceedings with his various wives (one of whom he stabbed), or in contests to prove that he was the world's heavyweight champion of everything (actually engaging in boxing matches, running for mayor of New York City in 1960, and generally promoting himself as the heir of Ernest Hemingway).

He also became a producer, director, and actor in several bad films. When he was at his best, however, as in the march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, an event that led to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Armies of the Night (1968), he was still an inimitably potent voice.

Although his later novels, such as Ancient Evenings (1984) and Harlot's Ghost (1991) seemed likely contenders for the Nobel Prize, many would agree that he deserved it anyway, for his total work represents a truly resonant and creative attempt to probe the mysteries of contemporary individuals and society. Mailer received a medal of honor for lifetime achievement by the National Book Foundation in 2005.

Mailer is survived by his sixth wife, Norris Church Mailer; nine children and grandchildren.