November 10: Norman Mailer

Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes — for The Executioner’s Song, 1980, and Armies of the Night, 1968 — Norman Mailer died at 84 on this date in 2007. He burst onto the American literary scene at the age of 25 with his best-selling military novel, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. More than most American writers, Mailer became a public, even celebrity, figure: an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War; a candidate for mayor of New York in 1969 on a platform of secession from the state and decentralization of the government; a periodic embarrassment with his public sexism, as the feminist movement grew in influence; a brilliant if bombastic cultural critic. Mailer helped invent the literary genre of creative nonfiction (“the new journalism”) and co-founded New York’s Village Voice newspaper. He married six times, fathered nine children, and wrote forty books, including eleven novels, in a 59-year span. “Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.” —Norman Mailer