Whats he famous for again? I've forgotten..I'm such a philistine I only know him from gossip columns about fighting fellow journalists and being a pugilistic pothead.
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer first published The Village Voice, as an arts-oriented free weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation. In 1948, just before enrolling in the Sorbonne in Paris, he published a book that made him world-famous: The Naked and the Dead, based on his personal experiences during World War II. It was hailed by many as one of the best American novels to come out of the war years and named one of the "100 best novels in English language" by the Modern Library. In the following years, Mailer continued to work in the field of the novel. Barbary Shore (1951) was a surreal parable of Cold War left politics, set in a Brooklyn rooming-house. His 1955 novel The Deer Park drew on his experiences working as a screenwriter in Hollywood in the early 1950s. It was initially rejected by six publishers due to its sexual content. Other famous works include: The Presidential Papers (1963), An American Dream (1965), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), Armies of the Night (1968, awarded a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Marilyn (1973), The Fight (1975), The Executioner's Song (1979, awarded a Pulitzer Prize), Ancient Evenings (1983), Harlot's Ghost (1991), Oswald's Tale (1995), and The Castle in the Forest (2007). In 1968 he received a George Polk Award for his reporting in Harper's Magazine. In addition to his experimental fiction and nonfiction novels, Mailer has produced a play version of The Deer Park, and in the late 1960s directed a number of improvisational avant-garde films in a Warhol style, including Maidstone (1970), which includes a brutal brawl between Norman T. Kingsley, played by himself, and Rip Torn that may or may not have been planned. He co-wrote some episodes of the 1970s TV series Starsky and Hutch. In 1987, he adapted and directed a film version of his novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, starring Ryan O'Neal, which has become a minor camp classic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer
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. http://news.aol.com/entertainment/s...4/20071110073909990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001
He's a crap writer, try reading his books sometime. I can't for the life of me fathom why he's a "great" American writer, beyond the fact he was around in the 60s and hung out with the Lefties. Regardless, he wrote a bunch of books nobody has ever read, and 50 or 100 years from now, I doubt he's anything more than a footnote in literary history.
