Norman Mailer, the pugnacious two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner who was a dominating presence on the United States literary scene across seven decades, died on Saturday of kidney failure, his family said. He was 84.
Known for his biting prose, penchant for controversy and as an antagonist of the feminist movement, Mailer had struggled with his health for months, undergoing lung surgery in October and spending five days in a Boston hospital in September.
”With great sorrow, the family of Norman Mailer announces his passing on November 10, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City,” the statement said.
Mailer was born on January 31 1923 to a New Jersey Jewish family. According to Wikipedia, his father was a South African-born accountant and his mother ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and was admitted to Harvard at the age of 16.
In more than 40 books and a torrent of essays, Mailer provoked and enraged readers with his strident views on US political life and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
Mailer’s first book, The Naked and the Dead, is considered one of the finest novels about World War II and made him a celebrity at age 25 when published in 1948. During the war, Mailer served in the Philippines.
”From one end of his life to the other he sat in solemn thought and left so much to read, so many pages with ideas that come at you like sparks spitting from a fire,” said columnist and author Jimmy Breslin.
In 1969, Mailer waded into politics with a run for New York mayor, with Breslin running for city council president. ”He argued brilliantly for the absolute necessity of the minds of whites and blacks growing by being in the same city school classrooms,” said Breslin.
Mailer’s works were often filled with violence, sexual obsession and views that angered feminists. He later reconsidered many of his old positions, but never surrendered his right to speak his mind.
”I found him to be extremely kind and gentle,” bestselling novelist Luanne Rice, a friend of Mailer, said in an interview. ”The Norman Mailer that I knew was very different from the angry, contentious man that was famous.”
Rice, now 52, was just starting out as a writer when she met Mailer in the late 1980s. He invited her to join him for a drink, they talked, and over the years she said he became a mentor and father figure to the budding writer.
His books Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner’s Song (1979) both won him the Pulitzer Prize.
Feuding with authors
Detractors considered him an intellectual bully and he feuded with fellow authors such as Truman Capote, William Styron, Tom Wolfe and Norman Podhoretz.
Feminists such as Germaine Greer and Kate Millett considered him the quintessential male chauvinist pig.
Some of the feuds even turned physical for the former college boxer, who stabbed one of his six wives at a party — and decked writer Gore Vidal.
Mailer lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and had an apartment in Brooklyn, New York. In Provincetown, he was known as a generous public figure in his later years who loved to play poker and often held games at his Provincetown home.
He is survived by his wife, Norris Church Mailer, and nine children, the family said. His son Stephen was at his side when he died at 4.30am local time.
A private service and interment will be announced next week, and a memorial service in New York in coming months.
”He was a towering figure who wrote some of the best journalism in the English language, especially in the Sixties and Seventies,” said Peter Manso, a Mailer biographer.