Norman Mailer Pulitzer-Winning Author, Dies at 84

Nov. 10 -- Norman Mailer, the prolific writer whose public brawls and macho swagger often overshadowed his Pulitzer Prize-winning prose that challenged society's views of politics and sex, died early today. He was 84.

Mailer died of renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, according to an e-mailed statement from J. Michael Lennon, the author's literary executor and official biographer. Mailer had been hospitalized last month for surgery to remove scar tissue on one of his lungs. He lived in Brooklyn, New York.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the maverick author was perhaps more famous for his self-aggrandizing public behavior and grandiose ambitions than for his writing talent. There were six marriages, the stabbing of his second wife, the alcohol-infused fights and the feuds with literary figures such as Gore Vidal, all from a slight, curly-haired man. He even ran two quixotic campaigns to become New York City's mayor.

``You develop a perverse appetite for publicity,'' he once said, ``even though you hate it.''

Mailer was a prolific, experimental writer who often examined the conflict between individual and collective power in politics and sex. His early novels, such as ``The Naked and the Dead,'' focused on individuals who violated social or political standards for self-knowledge, breaches he committed often in public life.

While Mailer wanted to be remembered as a novelist, many critics found his nonfiction better. In the 1960s, Mailer was one of the pioneers of the ``New Journalism'' movement, comprised of non-fiction narratives from the writer's point of view that used literary devices such as dialogue and multiple viewpoints.

`Wasted' Talent

The format broke down traditional barriers separating fiction, journalism and biography. Mailer used the technique to produce masterful works that challenged the relationship between sex, violence and power in post-World War II society.

Critics praised his diversity of subjects and portrayals of modern culture, though they maligned his public posturing, radical political theories and focus on psychosis, sex and violence.

``He has wasted much of his talent on money-spinning inelegance and fruitless meanderings and quests into the mysteries of sex and destiny, but he has also risked and emboldened his talent by imagining himself at the core of things,'' said Andrew O'Hagan in the London Review of Books.

Several critics contended that Mailer would have a richer literary legacy if he had spent less time embellishing his prodigious public persona and more time on his writing. The London Observer's Lynn Barber said in 1996 that no other writer veers so sharply ``between passages of hair-raising beauty and sheer maundering twaddle.''

Early Years

Norman Kingsley Mailer was born on Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn. He entered Harvard University at age 16 and graduated with an aeronautical engineering degree. He won a college fiction contest and wrote for the literary magazine.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army and fought in the Philippines as a rifleman during World War II. That experience inspired his debut novel, ``The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), about a standoff between an authoritarian general and his liberal aide as they lead a platoon to overtake a fictional Japanese-held island. The book was praised for its realistic descriptions of war and topped the New York Times bestseller list for 11 weeks.

Mailer's next two novels, ``Barbary Shore'' (1951) and ``The Deer Park'' (1955), were critical and popular failures, panned for graphic sexual descriptions and cynical attacks on the Cold War.

Village Voice

His 1965 ``An American Dream,'' was a commercial success and controversial, as protagonist Stephen Rojack, loosely modeled after Mailer, murders his wife and participates in sexual orgies in his quest for self-actualization.

In 1955 he co-founded the Village Voice, an alternative weekly newspaper, which offered a forum for his budding career as a journalist, essayist and critic. He gained media attention with 1959's `Advertisements for Myself,'' a collection of essays, including ``The White Negro.''

Mailer's notoriety increased in 1960, when he was committed to New York's Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric ward for 15 days. He stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, near-fatally with a penknife after an unofficial kickoff party for his mayoral campaign. He got a suspended sentence for third-degree assault.

In the 1960s, Mailer cemented his reputation as a leading non-fiction writer and sociopolitical critic. He wrote ``non- fiction fiction,'' part of the New Journalism movement. Mailer comically exaggerated his role in the 1967 march on the Pentagon while disparaging the Vietnam War in 1968's ``The Armies of the Night,'' which won him his first Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

Jack Henry Abbott

His subsequent works of political journalism were just as biting, including ``Miami and the Siege of Chicago,'' about the tumultuous 1968 political conventions. He wrote ``The Prisoner of Sex'' (1971), a scathing commentary on the women's movement that rankled feminists, in response to Kate Millett's charges of sexism in her ``Sexual Politics'' (1970).

A former amateur boxer, Mailer went to Zaire, Africa, for the 1974 heavyweight title fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali and in the following year produced a book about Ali's legendary victory, ``The Fight.''

Mailer again attracted more notoriety when he persuaded the Utah State Prison parole board to release convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbott, who killed again a month after leaving prison. He met Abbott while researching his second Pulitzer-winning book, ``The Executioner Song'' (1979), an exhaustively reported profile of killer Gary Gilmore, the first person to be executed after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

Later Years

He followed that groundbreaking work with two lengthy, meticulously researched novels in his unique ``sprawling'' style: ``Ancient Evenings'' (1983), a tale of ancient Egypt that took 12 years to write, and ``Harlot's Ghost'' (1991), a 1,310-page study of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War.

A longtime member of the international writer's organization PEN, Mailer served as president of the PEN American Center from 1984 to 1986.

Mailer received the American Academy of Arts and Science's Emerson-Thoreau Medal for lifetime literary achievement in 1989.

In the 1990s, Mailer continued his obsessive examination of contemporary U.S. history with ``Oswald's Tale: an American Mystery'' (1995), a journalistic probe into the mind of John F. Kennedy's assassin. He then returned to controversial examinations of religion and society with ``The Gospel According to the Son,'' a first-person ``autobiography'' of Jesus Christ.

Adolf Hitler

Mailer spent most of his later years at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He walked with canes due to arthritis and used hearing aids.

He continued to comment on social and political issues, criticizing mass technology and the war in Iraq. Mailer published a 50-year retrospective anthology of his work in 1998 and set forth his views on writing in ``The Spooky Art.''

He sold his archives to the University of Texas at Austin for $2.5 million in 2005.

In 2007, he published his first new book in a decade, ``The Castle in the Forest,'' a fictionalized account of the life of Adolf Hitler. Mailer said he had thought about Hitler since childhood, but decided to write the book only after reading Ron Rosenbaum's ``Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origin of Evil'' (1999).

``After I finished reading the book -- you can't be a novelist all your life without developing a certain species of arrogance -- I thought, I know more about it than these folks,'' he told the Toronto Star, referring to the 15 authorities Rosenbaum had interviewed.

Reviewer Lee Siegel of the New York Times called the book ``remarkable,'' and ``Mailer's most perfect apprehension of the absolutely alien.'' The much-discussed book demonstrated the power that came from what Siegel said was Mailer's simultaneous self-surrender and astringent assertiveness.

Mailer's latest book, ``On God: An Uncommon Conversation,'' was released last month.

``I used to write 10 hours a day, now I can do three or four in the afternoon,'' he said earlier that year. ``Any day you can work is a blessing.''

Survivors include artist Norris Church, who was his sixth wife, and eight children from various marriages and one adopted child.