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Sports fan, essayist, journalist, critic, poet, putative politician, movie-maker and all-round social provocateur, Mailer was as prolific as he was pugnacious. He wrote 40 novels, including The Armies of the Night (1968), about the anti-Vietnam march on the Pentagon, and The Executioner's Song, a sweeping account of the life and death before firing squad of Gary Gilmore, each of which earned him Pulitzer Prizes. The gruff godfather to a generation of post-war American writers, Mailer was also a pioneer of the "New Journalism" movement, breaking the mould of traditional reporting with a free-form style that melded fact with fiction, and objectivity with subjective bursts. He was a co-founder of The Village Voice in New York and co-carouser with the Beat heroes Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Instantly recognisable to fans in Brooklyn Heights, where he had a home nearly all his life, and in Provincetown, Massachusetts, his preferred domicile in later years, Mailer was perhaps the first of his profession to cross into the parallel world of writer as celebrity. "You develop a perverse appetite for publicity," he once said, "even though you hate it." Over the years, some critics contended his brilliance on the page was sometimes compromised by his other parts n among them the self-aggrandising bully whose personal life was as tumultuous as his mind. Distractions included periods of drinking and drugs, running to be Mayor of his beloved New York, spinning a revolving door of wives (six in all, one of whom, Adele Morales, he stabbed almost fatally), and fathering eight children and adopting one more. He also repeatedly arm-wrestled with his critics and peers, most frequently Gore Vidal. He was, the novelist Erik Tarloff said, "the crazy uncle of American literature ... endearing and obnoxious, graceful and loutish, shrewd and clueless ... his own biggest fan and his own worst enemy". — By arrangement with The Independent
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The
vanishing of the voice of Norman Kingsley Mailer will leave an
unfamiliar quiet in the American intellectual echo-chamber. Whether it
was women's lib (he did not much like it), the Vietnam War, the decline
of the written word as entertainment, the tyranny of technology or the
latest news from professional boxing, Mailer always had an opinion to
share.