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Author Norman Mailer - 2x Pulitzer - dies
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Literary lion Norman Mailer dies
(CNN) -- Norman Mailer, the outspoken author whose prize-winning works made him a towering figure on the American literary stage for more than 50 years, is dead. He was 84.
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.
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(CNN) -- Norman Mailer, the outspoken author whose prize-winning works made him a towering figure on the American literary stage for more than 50 years, is dead. He was 84.
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.
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