Pulitzer winner Norman Mailer dead at 84

[waltky]

10 Nov. 2007 - Norman Mailer, the pugnacious prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song," has died at the age of 84.

Mailer died Saturday of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, J. Michael Lennon, the author's literary executor and biographer, said. "He was a great American voice," said a tearful Joan Didion, author of "The Year of Magical Thinking" and other works, struggling for words upon learning of Mailer's death.

From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as "The Armies of the Night," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner 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 bellicose, 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 City on a "left conservative" platform, 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.

Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the Pentagon protests in the late 1960s. While directing the film "Maidstone" in 1968, the self-described "old club fighter" punched actor Lane Smith, breaking his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn's ear in another scuffle. But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, "In the end, it is the writing that will count."

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Mailer given post-humous award...

Norman Mailer awarded Bad Sex prize
November 28, 2007 - WRITER Norman Mailer, a giant of the American literary scene and twice a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has been posthumously given the Bad Sex in Fiction Award today.

"We are sure that he would have taken the prize in good humour," the judges said of the award to Mailer, who died on November 10 of kidney failure at the age of 84. They paid homage to Mailer as a great American man of letters and hailed his "innovative journalism, his combative spirit and his love of life".

However, they could not resist awarding him the prize for a graphic passage in his novel The Castle in the Forest. The award most dreaded by authors was established in 1993 by the late Auberon Waugh when he was editor-in-chief of The Literary Review.

Previous winners have included US writer Tom Wolfe and British author Sebastian Faulks. Mailer, renowned for his biting prose, penchant for controversy and larger-than-life personality, had provoked and enraged readers with his acerbic views on US politics and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

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