Norman Mailer, the pugnacious two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who jabbed and bobbed his way through an extraordinary career as one of the most original and audacious voices in postwar American letters, died Saturday. He was 84.
Beset by serious health problems that required heart-bypass surgery in 2005 and hospitalizations for lung problems this fall, Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, according to J. Michael Lennon, his literary executor.
Mailer, called “a great and obsessed stylist” by Joan Didion, wrote nearly 50 books that zigzagged among genres, including fiction, biography, history, essays and highly personal journalism. He was a grand provocateur with an unapologetically macho sensibility who, in acts on and off the page, reaped more glory, failure and notoriety than any other major writer of his generation.
In his work he grappled with the salient events and personalities of his time, whether writing about the Cold War and Vietnam War protests or icons including Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali. Writing of existentialism, political conventions, Apollo moon shots, sex and relations between the sexes, Mailer refracted the gamut of culture through what writer Camille Paglia called his “very complex consciousness.”
His fiction revealed the enormity of his aspirations. After rocketing to the top of the literary heap at age 25 with a World War II novel, “The Naked and the Dead” (1948), he wrote a so-called “autobiography” of Jesus (“The Gospel According to the Son”) and a saga that swept across two centuries of Egyptian history (“Ancient Evenings”). His last novel, “The Castle in the Forest,” published this year, imagines Adolf Hitler as a boy and is narrated by a devil.
Although novelist was the identity Mailer most cherished, it was not his most celebrated role. He “has never been able to write convincing dialogue, a fact that has seriously limited him,” Tom Wolfe once wrote. Of Mailer’s four dozen books, only 10 were novels in the traditional sense, and the bad reviews outweighed the good.
Wolfe and other critics found more to admire in Mailer’s command of the hybrid genre that became known as New Journalism, the novelistic rendering of factual stories. “The Armies of the Night” (1968), about the 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon, and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979), about Utah double-murderer Gary Gilmore, proved Mailer the master of this demanding form, pioneered by Truman Capote, that blurred the lines between literature and reportage. The Pulitzer committee honored the former for nonfiction and the latter for fiction, validating the protean nature of Mailer’s talent.
The hubris that enabled such bold work also fueled the extra-literary exploits that burnished Mailer’s unruly image. He divorced five wives and, in 1960, nearly stabbed one to death.
In the 1970s, at the height of the women’s movement, he was reviled by feminists, in part because of the stabbing but also because of impolitic characterizations of women as “low, sloppy beasts” made to bear children. In 1981 he sponsored the parole of Jack Henry Abbott, a convict with literary ambitions, an experience that turned tragic when Abbott killed a man six weeks after his release.
Mailer was notorious for tussling with critics. Backstage at “The Dick Cavett Show” in the early 1970s, he head-butted Gore Vidal, who had written that Mailer’s violent streak put him in the same league as mass murderer Charles Manson. (After the head-butting, Vidal quipped, “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.”)
Mailer’s tough-guy approach also was reflected in a proposal offered during his quixotic 1969 run for New York mayor (with columnist Jimmy Breslin as his running mate) to ease urban tensions by holding armored jousts in Central Park.
Mailer entered Harvard at 16 and earned a degree in engineering in 1943. He stuck with engineering even though as a freshman he discovered a love of modern American literature. In his sophomore year, he began to write Hemingway-esque short stories for the Harvard Advocate. One of those stories, “The Greatest Thing in the World,” won Story magazine’s college competition in 1941.
When World War II commenced, he regarded it as an opportunity to be mined. While other young men contemplated which branch of the military to join, “I was worrying darkly whether it would be more likely that a great war novel would be written about Europe or the Pacific,” he wrote, “and the longer I thought, the less doubt there was in my mind. Europe was the place.”
The Army had other plans. Mailer was drafted and sent to the Pacific as the Philippines campaign was winding up. When he returned home in 1946, he gathered the letters he had written to his wife of two years and used them as notes for his war novel, “The Naked and the Dead.”
The book, written in 15 months in an unsentimental yet conventional style, was hailed by critics as a supremely accomplished debut, with Orville Prescott of The New York Times calling it “the most impressive novel about the Second World War that I have ever read.” It remained on The New York Times’ best-seller list for a year, holding the No. 1 spot for 11 straight weeks, and turned the first-time author into a sensation. Nearly 60 years later, it is still considered one of the best American war novels and Mailer’s finest effort as a novelist.
In later years, although badly hobbled by arthritis, Mailer at 80 still found battles worthy of his ire. He launched tirades against the Iraq war, criticizing President Bush in college lectures and a slim 2003 book, “Why Are We at War?” In 2005, Mailer told Rolling Stone magazine that he was “no longer trying to write the Great American Novel,” but his 10th novel, published two years later, showed that his goals remained huge.
Described as “a work of fiction closely based on history,” “The Castle in the Forest” is a metaphysical adventure based on Mailer’s theory that the devil was present at the moment of Hitler’s conception. It was a best-seller, despite a mixed critical reception.
Fittingly for Mailer, he followed the novel about the devil with a book about God: “On God: An Uncommon Conversation,” a dialogue with his literary executor Lennon in which he explains his notions of an artistic deity.
By all accounts, he never wrote the great American novel. But Mailer, according to Yale scholar and critic Harold Bloom, belongs in the pantheon of literature’s giants.
“He may be remembered more as prose prophet than as a novelist,” Bloom wrote some years ago, “as a historian of the moral consciousness of his era, and as the representative writer of his generation.”
Noted works
Novels, journals and essays
- “The Naked and the Dead” 1948
- “The Barbary Shore” 1951
- “The Deer Park” 1955
- “The White Negro,” essay, 1957
- “Advertisements for Myself” 1959
- “The Presidential Papers” 1963
- “An American Dream” 1965
- “Cannibals and Christians,” essay, 1966
- “Why Are We in Vietnam?” 1967
- “The Armies of the Night” (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize) 1968
- “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” 1968
- “Of a Fire on the Moon” 1971
- “The Prisoner of Sex,” essay, 1971
- “Existential Errands” 1972
- “St. George and the Godfather” 1972
- “Marilyn” 1973
- “The Faith of Graffiti,” essay, 1974
- “The Fight” 1975
- “Some Honorable Men” 1975
- “Genius and Lust” 1976
- “A Transit to Narcissus” 1978
- “The Executioner’s Song” (Pulitzer Prize) 1979
- “Of Women and Their Elegance, Pieces and Pontifications,” essay, 1982
- “Ancient Evenings” 1983
- “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” 1984
- “Harlot’s Ghost” 1991
- “The Gospel According to the Son” 1997
Poetry
- “Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters” 1962
Films directed
- “Wild 90” 1967
- “Beyond the Law” 1967
- “Maidstone” 1968
- “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” 1987
