Norman Mailer

American · 1923 to 2007

Born Nachem Malech Mailer on January 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey, the son of a South African accountant and a Lithuanian Jewish mother who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, he was raised in Brooklyn, first in Flatbush and then Crown Heights, and entered Harvard at sixteen on a scholarship to study aeronautical engineering. He took the writing electives instead, won Story magazine's college contest at eighteen, and graduated with honours in 1943. The Army sent him to the Philippines as an infantryman, where he served on more than two dozen reconnaissance patrols and wrote about four hundred letters home to his first wife Bea. From those letters and that experience he made The Naked and the Dead (1948), published when he was twenty-five, sixty-two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and three million copies sold in the first decade. He spent the next ten years failing to follow it, drinking, brawling, and in 1960 stabbing his second wife Adele with a penknife at a party meant to launch his run for mayor of New York. He served three years of probation. He rebuilt himself in the New Journalism, casting himself as protagonist in The Armies of the Night (1968), his account of the march on the Pentagon, and won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. A second Pulitzer came for The Executioner's Song (1979), the slow, factual narrative of Gary Gilmore's execution by firing squad in Utah. He wrote thirty-some books, married six times, fathered nine children, ran twice for office, and never stopped picking fights. He died of acute renal failure on November 10, 2007, at eighty-four.