• Born: 31 January 1923
• Birthplace: Long Branch, New Jersey
• Died: 10 November 2007 (renal failure)
• Best Known As: Pugnacious author of The Naked and the Dead

Name at birth: Norman Kingsley Mailer

Called "the macho prince of American letters" by the Associated Press, Norman Mailer was one of America's most famous and controversial writers in the years after World War II. Mailer twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for The Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song (1979). Mailer became an international celebrity at the age of 25 thanks to The Naked and the Dead, his gritty 1948 combat novel based on his experiences as a soldier in the Philippines. He published less successful novels in the 1950s and '60s, but also co-founded the New York newspaper The Village Voice and wrote essays on contemporary issues and personalities, including boxing, Hollywood, presidential campaigns, Marilyn Monroe and Lee Harvey Oswald. Mailer was reviled by some and adored by others; he had a knack for publicity and enjoyed a good scrap, literary or physical, somewhat in the mode of Ernest Hemingway. Mailer's other books include Advertisements For Myself (1959), a collection of writings that includes the widely read essay "The White Negro," and the novels Ancient Evenings (1983) and Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984).

Mailer was married six times... He attended Harvard, graduating in 1943 before joining the Army... He wrote several screenplays, including for The Executioner's Song (in 1982) and Tough Guys Don't Dance (in 1987, with Mailer also directing)... Like his contemporary Gore Vidal, Mailer dabbled in politics -- he ran for mayor of New York City in 1969 and lost... In 2005 he was given an award for lifetime achievement by the National Book Foundation.

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• Born: Jan 31, 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey
• Occupation: Actor, Writer, Director
• Active: '60s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Culture & Society
• Career Highlights: The Executioner's Song, Town Bloody Hall, Maidstone
• First Major Screen Credit: The Naked and the Dead (1958)

Biography

Having established himself as one of the major American writers of his generation with his novels (The Naked and the Dead, An American Dream) and his non-fiction (Advertisements for Myself, The Armies of the Night), Mailer began writing, directing, and acting in his own independent films, drawing inspiration from Warhol and Cassavetes. He debuted in 1968 with two provocative features, Wild 90 and Beyond the Law. His third film Maidstone, a bizarre satire of presidential campaigning, was his most technically ambitious work; it achieved instant notoriety for including in its final cut a vicious brawl between Mailer and his costar Rip Torn. In 1982 he wrote the script for the television adaptation of his novel The Executioner's Song; five years later he wrote and directed the theatrical feature Tough Guys Don't Dance, an adaptation of his detective novel. Mailer also appeared in the Milos Forman film Ragtime and Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear. ~ All Movie Guide

Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story Buy this Movie	Biography: Pablo Picasso - A Primitive Soul Buy this Movie	Keep The River On Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale Buy this Movie	The Source Buy this Movie
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Norman Kingsley Mailer (1923-2007), American author, film producer and director, wrote one of the most noteworthy American novels about World War II. Only in his later political journalism did he reach that level of achievement again.

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on Jan. 31, 1923. The family soon moved to Brooklyn. Mailer graduated from high school in 1939 and earned a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering from Harvard University. He won a college fiction contest, wrote for the Harvard Advocate, worked on two ambitious (unpublished) novels, and contributed a no-vella to an anthology. Drafted into the Army in 1944, he served in the Philippines in an infantry regiment, as both intelligence clerk and combat reconnaissance rifleman.

In the Army, Mailer knew he was living the material for his third novel. From notes in letters to his wife, he fashioned a brilliant narrative around an Army platoon's taking of a Japanese-held Pacific island. Borrowing naturalist techniques from John Dos Passos and James Farrell, a symbolist's stance from Herman Melville, and the instinctive journalist's observations from Ernest Hemingway, he described (in language considered objectionable in its day) the ironies of war and the inner conflicts of a cross section of American fighting men. Many readers saw only the realism in The Naked and the Dead (1948). Mailer insisted he was writing not only of a specific war but of "death and man's creative urge, fate, man's desire to conquer the elements…" The work was a popular success and won him critical acclaim.

After attending the Sorbonne in Paris under the G.I. Bill, Mailer returned to the United States in the mid-1950s, and founded, along with Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, the newspaper Village Voice.

In his next four novels, Mailer wrote from "intense political preoccupation and a voyage in political affairs which began with the Progressive Party and has ended in the cul-de-sac (at least so far as action is concerned) of being an anti-Stalinist Marxist who feels that war is probably inevitable." Barbary Shore (1951) is set in a Brooklyn rooming house. The Deer Park (1955), both the novel and the play Mailer adapted from it, takes place at a kind of Palm Springs of the imagination and focuses on two of Mailer's most memorable characters, Sergius O'Shaugnessy, former Air Force pilot, and Elena Esposito, broken-down dancer and actress. An American Dream (1965) shows Steve Rojack, trapped in an urban nightmare of sexual orgy, murder, and despair, escaping with what remains of his soul to the jungles of Yucatán. Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), the low ebb of Mailer's fiction, takes its 18-year-old hero on an Alaskan hunting expedition that ends with his initiation into manhood. These books voiced Mailer's view of the frustrations and compulsions that lay beneath the surface of American life, violently portrayed through existential heroes and at times written with flamboyant crudeness.

Mailer began a second career in the mid-1950s as essayist and journalist. He became a national personality with the publication of Advertisements for Myself (1959), a compendium of earlier writings that included bitter polemics, personal interviews, psychocultural essays, stories, works in progress, and unabashed confessions of how Mailer reached the depths of his own existential state and found a "new consciousness."

Although the sixties were a time of personal conflict and public rebellion for Mailer, he wrote many nonfiction works during that period that helped establish him as a preeminent writer in the genre. The Presidential Papers (1963) presented a critique of American politics and society that introduced a revitalized Mailer, the public historian of the John Kennedy years. This work along with Cannibals and Christians (1966) attempted to establish him as "self-appointed master of the Now." Issues pertaining to gender and sex were the basis of The Prisoner of Sex (1971), a treatise on Mailer's various sexual relationships in which he responds to Kate Millett's attack on his presumed sexism in her Sexual Politics (1970).

The peace march on Washington (1967) and the presidential conventions (1968) gave Mailer some of his most fruitful material. A seasoned reporter, he wove his copious notes into "non-fictional novels" using the style of New Journalism, in which factual events are related from the writer's perspective and incorporate prose devices such as narrative, dialogue, and multiple points of view. The Washington experience became The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968), for which he received a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The political conventions shaped Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968). In addition to reportage, these works reflect Mailer's personality and controversial opinions on historic events, creating incisive portraits of the conflict between individual and collective power.

Other works using New Journalism techniques include Of a Fire on the Moon (1971) about man's first landing on the moon, The Executioner's Song (1979), an examination of the life and death of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, the first person executed (in 1977) in the United States under death-penalty legislation in more than a decade, and Harlot's Ghost (1991), in which Mailer treats factual events such as the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs from an overtly fictional perspective to imagine the inner workings of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

During the 1990s, the prolific and egocentric writer again turned his attention to biographical essays and novels. Portrait of Picasso As A Young Man (1995) and Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (1995) received poor critical reviews for his reliance on what many considered dubious new sources for subjects whose lives were already well chronicled. Still, David Gelernter in the National Review credited Mailer's heavy use of other authors in Picasso saying, "Picasso is a collage…The counterpoint that results is odd but effective," and that there were occasional flourishes of brilliant writing. Among the theories he presents is that violence and death are at the heart of Picasso's Cubism.

Not one to shy away from challenging subjects, Mailer chose to write a novel about Jesus Christ in 1997. As noted in the New York Times Book Review, Mailer wrote not merely a life of Jesus, but a contemporary apocryphal Gospel, The Gospel According to the Son, in the first-person voice of Jesus Himself - a choice avoided by all surviving ancient Gospels and by virtually all modern novelists. As in many of his other works, critics pointed to spotty narrative brilliance and "rare powerful moments of invention." However, in Gospel, Mailer also was credited for his knowledge of canonical texts, as well as his surprising - and to some, disappointing - adherence to tradition.

Mailer continued analyzing and commenting on major social and political issues throughout the 1990s, often interviewing his philosophical opposites, such as the staunch right-wing politican and newscaster Patrick Buchanan. The self-styled maverick and outspoken social and political arbiter of the times was widely regarded as the most prominent writer of his generation, and praised for the diversity and scope of his works.

Further Reading

The fullest critiques of Mailer are Richard J. Foster, Norman Mailer (1968), and Barry H. Leeds, The Structural Vision of Norman Mailer (1969); see also Norman Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (1964); Ronald Berman, America in the Sixties: An Intellectual History (1968); Richard Gilman, The Confusion of Realms (1969); Laura Adams, Norman Mailer: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1974), Scarecrow; Laura Adams, editor, Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? (1974), Kennikat Press; Laura Adams, Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer (1976), Ohio University Press; Robert Alter, Motives for Fiction (1984), Harvard University Press; Martin Amis, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Jonathan Cape; and Chris Anderson, Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction (1987), Southern Illinois University Press.

For more information on Norman Mailer, visit Britannica.com.

(1923- ), novelist and filmmaker. At the climax of Mailer's fourth novel--titled, with bitter irony, An American Dream--the hero, who has murdered his wife, walks, drunk, around the parapet of a penthouse on a dare from his millionaire father-in-law. It is a foolish, even a childish thing to do, exhibitionistic and suicidal. And yet, as narrated by the hero, it also moves us as an authentic, existential, even religious validation of the self against the repressive forces of orthodoxy and the establishment.

Much of Mailer's unique, disturbing, and exhilarating presence in American letters is caught in that scene: an awkward tightrope-walk between the abyss and the luxury of success (another kind of abyss, really) that somehow, miraculously, comes off. Mailer is the drunken walker on the edge, taking wild risks with his art and his career for over forty years and somehow winning more often than he loses, and, most important, convincing us that this sort of risk-taking is crucial not just to his own self-definition but also to our imaginative survival in the big business, high-tech, soul-eating mindscape of post-World War II America. Advertisements for Myself he titled his 1965 collection of essays, poems, and stories: he has in fact not just advertised himself but made himself into a metaphor for the complex fate of the modern American imagination.

His first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), was an immense success and immensely misunderstood. There are still critics who speak of the "realism" of this war novel as if it were a standard from which his later work declined. In fact, there are no conventional battle scenes in the book. It is really not a "war novel" at all, as much as it is Mailer's prophetic vision of the America that will follow the war, an America divided between the spiritually "naked," who insist upon living life as a romantic quest for ultimate values, and the spiritually "dead," who embrace the killing blandishments of wealth and power. To see this is to see that Mailer has always been a moral allegorist, a legitimate heir of Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, and to see why his own career has been a constant flight from predictability, why for him "success" has to be a continual reinvention of himself against the very literary establishment that wants to canonize him, a "success" that only he can prove and that must be proved anew with every book.

No wonder, then, that in the fifties he was aligned with the antiestablishment Beat movement (though never quite fully a part of it) or that in the sixties and seventies his influence as well as his voice was strong among the writers of the new political and literary left (e.g., Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo). As novelist and as essayist, his voice is a consistent and wryly radical one. He admits that he has made it, become a permanent and permanently salable member of the literary establishment, and yet he resolutely refuses to settle for that. "History as a Novel" and "The Novel as History" are the subdivisions of his great 1970 book on the Vietnam War, The Armies of the Night. For this blustering, sometimes buffoonish man, politics and fiction are, at a very deep level, a single visionary act, an act of moral urgency for writer and readers alike. His novels of the eighties, Ancient Evenings (1982) and Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984), show nothing as much as the undiminished quality of his energy, the one a meditation on the morality of warfare set in pharaonic Egypt, the other an exploration of American sexual confusion cast as a hard-boiled detective novel. A self-made insider whose sympathies are all with the outsiders--the losers, bums, killers, and poets--Mailer has kept himself heroically on the edge and in doing so inspired a great deal of very good writing by others. If his talent is enormous, his influence and importance are likely to loom even larger.

Bibliography:

Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (1985); Frank D. McConnell, Four Postwar American Novelists (1977).

Author:

Frank D. McConnell

See also Literature.

1923–, American writer, b. Long Branch, N.J., grad. Harvard, 1943. He grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., served in the army during World War II, and at the age of 25 published The Naked and the Dead (1948), one of the most significant novels to emerge from the war. His next two novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), were generally considered failures. More successful was An American Dream (1966), an exploration of sex, violence, and death in America through the experiences of his semiautobiographical protagonist.

The Armies of the Night (1968; Pulitzer Prize), is an account of the 1967 peace march on Washington, D.C., in the personalized style of the “new journalism.” Among his other journalistic works are Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1969), A Fire on the Moon (1971), an account of the Apollo 11 moon flight, and The Executioner's Song (1979, Pulitzer Prize), on the life and execution of killer Gary Gilmore. The Prisoner of Sex (1971) is Mailer's response to the women's liberation movement. He also has written “interpretive biographies,” Oswald's Tale (1995), a study of the life of President Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1995), on the youth of Pablo Picasso.

Several recent novels have been long and intricate, and have met with decidedly mixed reviews: Ancient Evenings (1983) is set in pharaonic Egypt; Harlot's Ghost (1991) is a complex cold-war spy novel; and The Castle in the Forest (2007) is a fictional exploration of the boyhood of Adolf Hitler. A shorter detective novel, Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984), was made into a film in 1985. Among his other works are the nonfiction The White Negro (1958), Advertisements for Myself (1959), and Marilyn (1973).

Bibliography

See large retrospective anthology of his work, The Time of Our Time (1998), and anthology of his writings on writing, The Spooky Art (2003); biographies by H. Mills (1982), P. Manso (1986), C. Rollyson (1991), and M. V. Dearborn (1999); studies by B. H. Leeds (1969, 2002), L. Braudy, ed. (1972), R. Poirier (1972), J. Radford (1975), R. Merrill (1978, 1992), S. Cohen (1979), J. M. Lennon, ed. (1986), H. Bloom, ed. (1986, repr. 2003), J. Wenke (1987), N. Leigh (1990), M. K. Glenday (1995); bibliography by B. Sokoloff (1985).

(b. 1923)

1948	The Naked and the Dead. Drawing on his combat experiences in the Pacific, Mailer's naturalistic first novel about an American platoon's involvement in an invasion and occupation of a Japanese-held island is acclaimed as the most ambitious and powerful novel so far based on the war. The book tops the New York Times bestseller list for eleven consecutive weeks, and the twenty-five-year-old writer emerges as a literary celebrity of whom much is expected.
1951	Barbary Shore. Mailer's second novel deals with the inhabitants of a Brooklyn boardinghouse. This novel of ideas mixes political and existential themes with realistic and surrealistic methods, reminding reviewers of the works of both Franz Kafka and James A. Cain.
1955	The Deer Park. Mailer's third novel, set in a California desert community controlled by Hollywood, employs the film industry as a metaphor for America. The critics are unkind, calling the book self-indulgent and underdeveloped, and Mailer abandons his plan to make the novel part of a much larger cycle.
1957	"The White Negro." Mailer's essay attempts to trace the source of the "destructive, the liberating, the creative nihilism of the Hip" to African American experience, defining how the "psychic outlaw" opposes social and political repression. Regarded as one of the significant cultural documents of the period, it appears in Dissent, which Mailer edits, and would later be included in Advertisements for Myself (1959).
1959	Advertisements for Myself. Mailer's brawling miscellany includes important essays such as "The White Negro" and "Reflections on Hip;" poetry, plays, and short fiction, including "The Man Who Studied Yoga" and "The Time of Her Time;" and a running assessment of the writer's personal obsessions and professional career. By placing himself at the center of his work, Mailer anticipates his subsequent nonfictional efforts and the style of the so-called New Journalism.
1962	Death for the Ladies and Other Disasters. Mailer issues a series of short, mainly comic poems called by one reviewer "topographical trickery" and another "private silliness."
1963	The Presidential Papers. Employing the same devices of introductions and commentary in Advertisements for Myself, Mailer collects a number of essays and interviews purportedly to help instruct President Kennedy in "existential styles of political thought." Kennedy's death shortly after its publication dampens the book's reception. Included are some of Mailer's best journalistic pieces, such as "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," on the 1960 Democratic National Convention, and "Ten Thousand Words a Minute," on prizefighting.
1965	An American Dream. Stephen Rojack, the protagonist of Mailer's novel, murders his wife, sexually abuses his maid, and evades police prosecution. The book draws the ire of feminists, most notably Kate Millett, who in Sexual Politics (1970) describes the novel as "an exercise in how to kill your wife and live happily ever after." Others defend the book as one of Mailer's most powerful evocations of violence and madness in American society.
1966	Cannibals and Christians. Mailer's third miscellany of political, social, and literary writings from 1960 includes his reports on the 1964 presidential conventions and profiles of the nominees, Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson.
1967	Why Are We in Vietnam? Mailer provides an answer in the grotesque details of a bear hunt in Alaska. The story is narrated by a Dallas teenager, D.J., in a pastiche of contemporary American vernacular.
1968	The Armies of the Night. Mailer's recollections of his participation in the October 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon showcase his mastery of the "nonfiction novel." The book wins the Pulitzer Prize. Mailer receives the National Book Award for his other 1968 publication, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his account of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions.
1970	Of a Fire on the Moon. Adopting his nom de plume "Aquarius," Mailer contemplates the moon landing and the role of technology in modern society.
1971	The Prisoner of Sex. Mailer responds to Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), offering his interpretation of sexual matters in literature, women's liberation, and homosexuality. Mailer attacks feminists' "dull assumption that the sexual force for a man was the luck of his birth, rather than his finest moral product" and accuses feminism of being "artfully designed to advance the fortunes of the oncoming technology of the state." First published in Harper's magazine, it prompts the largest sales for any issue in the magazine's history and the dismissal of editor Willie Morris over the piece's language, which the owners deemed offensive.
1972	Existential Errands. Mailer collects a miscellany of essays, speeches, letters, a one-act play, and translations. He also publishes St. George and the Godfather, his reporting on the 1972 presidential conventions.
1973	Marilyn. The first of Mailer's two works dealing with film icon Marilyn Monroe takes a speculative biographical approach. Of Women and Their Elegance (1980) attempts an "imaginary memoir" from Monroe's perspective.
1975	The Fight. Mailer provides his perspective on Muhammad Ali's recapture of the heavyweight boxing title from George Foreman in their bout in Kinshasa, Zaire.
1979	The Executioner's Song. Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning "true-life" novel about Gary Gilmore, the first person to be executed (in 1977) in the United States for more than a decade, shows the author skillfully mining the territory of the "nonfiction novel" and the contemporary American cultural landscape.
1980	Of Women and Their Elegance. Accompanied by Milton Greene's stylish photographs of Marilyn Monroe, this "autobiography" of the actress assumes her voice and comments on aspects of her private life that she did not address in her own published autobiography. As in Marilyn (1973), his earlier biography, the book explores questions of identity, her attraction to acting, and the nature of her sexuality.
1982	Pieces and Pontifications. In this collection of Mailer's essays from the 1970s, the most important is "A Harlot High and Low," a long and probing examination of the CIA and the psychology of the spy. It would prepare the ground for his CIA novel, Harlot's Ghost (1991).
1983	Ancient Evenings. Mailer's mammoth book, set in Egypt during the years 1320-1121 b.c., concerns reincarnation, sexuality, and the correspondences between the age of Ramses II and modern America.
1984	Tough Guys Don't Dance. Mailer adapted this crime thriller into a film that he directed in 1987.
1991	Harlot's Ghost. In this mammoth novel about the CIA, Mailer's protagonist, Harry Hubbard, travels to Berlin, Uruguay, Washington, D.C., Miami, and Cuba, becoming involved in Cold War spying and conspiracies that cover most of the important political events between 1955 and 1963. While some critics find the work turgid, others praised its drive and comprehensiveness.
1995	Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery. Mailer's massive biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of John F. Kennedy, draws on formerly secret files of the Russian KGB in an attempt to discover Oswald's true character and resolve the question of his guilt. Mailer also publishes Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, a long-delayed biography of the painter, which receives mixed reviews. Many critics complain that the biography contains little that is new and that Mailer had missed an opportunity to bring something original to a subject with whom he had much in common.
1998	The Time of Our Time. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Naked and the Dead, Mailer delivers a massive retrospective of samples from his writing career, grouped by the historical eras they describe. Reviewer James Shapiro calls the book "a remarkable portrait of an artist and of the indelible mark he has left on American life and letters."

Quotes:

"The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution's in the soul."

"A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped."

"One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness -- the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others."

"There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away."

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

"Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men."

See more famous quotes by Norman Mailer

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