Literary lion Norman Mailer dies

By Todd Leopold
CNN



(CNN) -- Norman Mailer, the outspoken writer whose prize-winning works made him a towering figure on the American stage for more than 50 years, is dead. He was 84.

Norman Mailer, shown in February, cultivated a streetwise, brawling, larger-than-life image.

Mailer died about 4:30 a.m. Saturday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, his literary executor, J. Michael Lennon, said.

Author of "The Naked and the Dead," "The Armies of the Night" and "The Executioner's Song," Mailer was probably the most famous of the generation of writers who came of age after World War II -- he was certainly the most colorful, and most pugnaciously so.

He wrote constantly: novels, screenplays, articles (he was a key figure in the "New Journalism" movement of the 1960s), poems, polemics. He co-founded the Village Voice. He was married six times.

And with his brawny physique and outsize personality, Mailer was never one to shy from a fight, whether physical -- he once stabbed his second wife after a party -- or literary. His feuds made headlines.

He ran for mayor of New York, agitated for left-wing causes (though his 1971 book, "The Prisoner of Sex," made him a pariah to the feminist movement) and led a drive to obtain parole for a talented convict, Jack Henry Abbott -- an act that backfired when Abbott killed a man not long after being freed.

One of his books was called "Advertisements for Myself," and he wasn't kidding.

"He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements," his longtime rival Gore Vidal once said.

"Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision," Mailer observed. "The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation."

But, even as he walked both sides of that line, there was no doubting his literary talent. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice -- for "The Armies of the Night" (1968) and "The Executioner's Song" (1979) -- as well as the National Book Award and several other honors.

His literary style was energetic, muscular, relentless: Joan Didion, no slouch herself, called him "a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story."

Norman Kingsley Mailer was born January 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He describes his family -- his father was an accountant, his doting mother an assistant in running a trucking company -- as a "typical middle-class Jewish family," but other accounts refer to the clan as working-class.

Whatever the family's economic level, Mailer showed his mettle early, writing a 250-page story at age 9 and entering Harvard at 16. At the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university, he won a student fiction contest. He received a degree in engineering in 1943, but that was just a formality: "I knew there was one thing I wanted to be and that was a writer," he said.

Mailer joined the army after graduation and was sent to the Philippines, where he served as a rifleman and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant.

When the war ended, he entered Paris' Sorbonne as a graduate student and wrote his first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," inspired by his wartime experiences. The book, published in 1948, became a huge best-seller, and Mailer was famous. He was 25 years old.

"I understand one element of celebrity, which is the unreality of it," he said later. "At the age of 25 I went from being the kid next door ... to being called a major American writer -- that's a role you just don't fit at 25. ... I used to feel I was secretary to someone named Norman Mailer, (and) to meet him you had to meet me first."

Celebrity was intoxicating, however, and Mailer set out for its capital -- Hollywood -- in hopes of seeing "The Naked and the Dead" immortalized on celluloid. But the studios rejected the young writer and he returned to New York. A film version of the book finally appeared in 1958, with Aldo Ray, Cliff Robertson and Raymond Massey.

After one failed novel -- "The Barbary Shore" (1951), about McCarthyism -- his next book, "The Deer Park" (1955), took on Hollywood. The book's sexual content prompted six publishers to reject it, and when it was finally published by Putnam, reviews were middling to scathing: "Stultifies us with misanthropy," wrote The New York Times' John Brooks in one of the kinder notices. But the book sold moderately well and became a cult item in later years.

By then, Mailer was characterizing himself as a hipster, a "psychic outlaw." His 1957 essay, "The White Negro," dealt with alienation, anti-establishmentarianism and race relations. He followed that work with "Advertisements for Myself," a 1959 collection that, as its title promised, promoted its author and his anti-establishment beliefs. It became a favorite of the Beat generation.

But Mailer rose to a new level of prominence in the 1960s. He wrote an influential essay for Esquire during the 1960 presidential campaign, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," about John F. Kennedy, which the magazine later named one of its five best stories.

Mailer was a regular contributor to Esquire over the years. He reported on politics for several publications, often putting his point of view at the center of the story -- a hallmark of the "New Journalism" practiced by Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

Meanwhile, with a lifestyle redolent of rock stars (before such a species existed), he was a constant in gossip columns, particularly after the 1960 stabbing incident, for which he was temporarily confined to New York's Bellevue mental hospital.

As the atmosphere of the '60s became more tumultuous, Mailer found himself in his element. A 1967 novel was titled "Why Are We in Vietnam?" He turned a 1967 protest against the Pentagon into "The Armies of the Night," subtitled "History as a Novel, the Novel as History." Its main character was Norman Mailer. His coverage of the 1968 political conventions became "Miami and the Siege of Chicago." He wrote about the 1969 Apollo 11 moonshot in "Of a Fire on the Moon" (1971).

During this time, he was also appearing on talk shows to argue with all comers, making films -- one of them, "Maidstone" (1970), includes a brawl with actor Rip Torn -- and, in 1969, running for mayor of New York as an independent on a platform of city secession. He lost the race, one of the city's most contentious, to John Lindsay.

By the early '70s, Mailer was more than a writer -- he was a full-fledged personality. In 1973 he threw himself a 50th birthday party. The 550 guests, who paid $30 a head (a hefty sum in 1973), included the cream of New York's arts and political classes.

"These were people wholly unaccustomed to paying their way into any party. ... They came and they paid because Mailer has a magic command on our attention," The New York Times' John Leonard wrote.

But attention to his writing was waning. Books on Marilyn Monroe and boxing failed to move critics or audiences.

He reinvigorated his reputation with "The Executioner's Song," a 1,000-page "true-life novel" about convicted murderer Gary Gilmore. The book won Mailer his second Pulitzer Prize. He followed it up with "Ancient Evenings" (1983), set in ancient Egypt, and the hard-boiled detective story "Tough Guys Don't Dance." Mailer also directed the 1987 film version starring Ryan O'Neal.

His later novels include "Harlot's Ghost" (1992), another lengthy tome about the history of the CIA; "Oswald's Tale" (1995), about Kennedy's assassin; and "The Gospel According to the Son" (1997), which concerned Jesus Christ. His most recent novel, "The Castle in the Forest," probed the life of Adolf Hitler, told by a demon.

Mailer also remained involved in civic life, not always happily. In 1980 he led the movement to have a convicted killer, Jack Henry Abbott, released on parole. Abbott had published a book, "In the Belly of the Beast," with Mailer's help. Six weeks after his release in 1981, Abbott stabbed a restaurant employee to death. The Abbott affair was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in," Mailer later said.

In 1984 he traveled to the Soviet Union, reporting on a country he believed was imploding. He headed the international writers' organization PEN in the mid-'80s and continued to speak out on political topics well into his 80s.

Mailer had opinions on everything. The Associated Press compiled a few:

The '70s: "The decade in which image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on."

Poetry: A "natural activity ... a poem comes to one," whereas prose required making "an appointment with one's mind to write a few thousand words."

Journalism: Irresponsible. "You can't be too certain about what happened."

Technology: "Insidious, debilitating and depressing," and nobody in politics had an answer to "its impact on our spiritual well-being."

He distrusted technology so much he continued to write with a pen, some 1,500 words a day, according to AP. When a stranger asked him if he used a computer, AP reports, he replied, "No, I never learned that," then added, "but my girl does."

In a 1971 magazine piece about women's liberation, Mailer compared the dehumanization of technology to the effect of feminists, who he said were abolishing the "mystery, romance" and "blind, goat-kicking lust from sex," AP reports.

Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards in 2005, where, AP reports, he deplored the decline of interest in the "serious novel."

Mailer said, according to AP, that when he was young, "fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway ... I don't think the same thing can be said anymore. I don't think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me."

Even as he settled into a quieter life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with his sixth wife, Norris Church, Mailer was always thinking, always moving.

"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit," he once said.

He made the most of his own time on Earth.