Norman Mailer, Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner Dies At 84
Posted November 10, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Norman Mailer, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author, died of kidney failure at a New York hospital Saturday. He was 84.
Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, 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, 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 earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard University, where he decided to become a writer, and was soon drafted into the Army. Sent to the Philippines as an infantryman and wrote his first book, “The Naked and the Dead,” published in 1948 while he was a postgraduate student in Paris.
In “Advertisements for Myself” (1959), Mailer promised to write the greatest novel yet, but later conceded he had not. Among other notable works: “Cannibals and Christians” (1966); “Why Are We in Vietnam?” (1967); and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” (1968), an account of the two political conventions that year. In 2005, he received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards.
Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn.
J. Michael Lennon, the author’s biographer, said arrangements for a private service and burial for family members and close friends would be announced next week, and a memorial service would be held in New York in the coming months.
