In memoriam Norman Mailer (1923-2007).

With the publication of The Naked and the Dead (1948), a semiautobiographical novel about fighting the Japanese on a Pacific island during World War II, Norman Mailer arrived on the literary scene. Although Mailer--born into a Jewish family and raised in Brooklyn--studied aeronautical engineering at Harvard, he soon turned to writing. Creating a larger-than-life persona, Mailer forged a bold, courageous, poetic style in his novels, nonfiction, and counterculture essays. Infamous for his drinking, womanizing (he had six wives, one of whom he stabbed), bluster, and nonconformist views, he nonetheless earned deep respect--and even greater controversy--for many of his works, which were often deliberately provocative and obscene. As a cofounder of The Village Voice in 1955, he helped pioneer the "New Journalism." The Armies of the Night (1968) earned the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for its portrayal of the anti-Vietnam War March on the Pentagon in October 1967. The Executioner's Song (1979), a true-life novel about convicted death-row murderer Gary Gilmore, won Mailer his second Pulitzer. In 2005, Mailer received the National Book Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Look for our complete profile in an upcoming issue.

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