Mailer appeared at the end of the "grey flannel suit" era, and was a blast of liberation in that time of bland conformity. With writers like Dwight MacDonald, Paul Goodman, Terry Southern and James Baldwin, he made literary culture subversive.
BobW
--- Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>
>
> November 10, 2007
> Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84
> By CHARLES McGRATH
>
> Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and
> often outspoken novelist
> who loomed over American letters longer and larger
> than any writer of his
> generation, died today at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New
> York. He was 84.
>
> The cause was renal failure , said J. Michael
> Lennon, his literary
> executor. Mr. Mailer burst on the scene in 1948 with
> “The Naked and the
> Dead,” a partly autobiographical novel about World
> War II, and for the
> next six decades he was rarely far from the center
> stage. He published
> more than 30 books, including novels, biographies
> and works of
> nonfiction, and twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for
> “The Armies of the
> Night” (1968), which also won the National Book
> Award, and “The
> Executioner’s Song” (1979).
>
> He also wrote, directed, and acted in several
> low-budget movies, helped
> found The Village Voice and for many years was a
> regular guest on
> television talk shows, where he could reliably be
> counted on to make
> oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative
> opinions, sometimes
> coherently and sometimes not.
>
> Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that
> regarded novel
> writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic
> characters with egos
> to match. He was the most transparently ambitious
> writer of his era,
> seeing himself in competition not just with his
> contemporaries but with
> the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
>
> He was also the least shy and risk-averse of
> writers. He eagerly sought
> public attention, and publicity inevitably followed
> him on the few
> occasions when he tried to avoid it. His big ears,
> barrel chest, striking
> blue eyes and helmet of seemingly electrified hair —
> jet black at first
> and ultimately snow white — made him instantly
> recognizable, a celebrity
> long before most authors were lured out into the
> limelight.
>
> At different points in his life Mr. Mailer was a
> prodigious drinker and
> drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a
> would-be politician who
> ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist,
> an antiwar
> protester, an opponent of women’s liberation and an
> all-purpose feuder
> and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest
> provocation would happily
> engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random
> punch-throwing. Boxing
> obsessed him and inspired some of his best writing.
> Any time he met a
> critic or a reviewer, even a friendly one, he would
> put up his fists and
> drop into a crouch.
>
> Gore Vidal, with whom he frequently wrangled, once
> wrote: “Mailer is
> forever shouting at us that he is about to tell us
> something we must know
> or has just told us something revelatory and we
> failed to hear him or
> that he will, God grant his poor abused brain and
> body just one more
> chance, get through to us so that we will know. Each
> time he speaks he
> must become more bold, more loud, put on brighter
> motley and shake more
> foolish bells. Yet of all my contemporaries I retain
> the greatest
> affection for Norman as a force and as an artist. He
> is a man whose
> faults, though many, add to rather than subtract
> from the sum of his
> natural achievements.”
>
> Mr. Mailer was a tireless worker who at his death
> was writing a sequel to
> his 2007 novel, “The Castle in the Forest.” If some
> of his books, written
> quickly and under financial pressure, were not as
> good as he had hoped,
> none of them were forgettable or without his
> distinctive stamp. And if he
> never quite succeeded in bringing off what he called
> “the big one” — the
> Great American Novel — it was not for want of
> trying.
>
> Along the way, he transformed American journalism by
> introducing to
> nonfiction writing some of the techniques of the
> novelist and by placing
> at the center of his reporting a brilliant, flawed
> and larger-than-life
> character who was none other than Norman Mailer
> himself.
>
> A Pampered Son
>
> Norman Kingsley — or, in Hebrew, Nachem Malek —
> Mailer was born in Long
> Branch, N.J., on Jan. 31, 1923. His father, Isaac
> Barnett, known as
> Barney, was a South African émigré, a snappy dresser
> — he sometimes wore
> spats and carried a walking stick — and a largely
> ineffectual
> businessman.
>
> The dominant figure in the family was Mr. Mailer’s
> mother, Fanny
> Schneider, who came from a vibrant clan in Long
> Branch, where her father
> ran a grocery store and was the town’s unofficial
> rabbi. Though another
> child, Barbara, was born in 1927, Norman remained
> his mother’s favorite;
> she declared him “perfect” — a judgment from which
> she never deviated, no
> matter how her son behaved in later life.
>
> When Norman was 9, the family moved to Crown
> Heights, in Brooklyn.
> Pampered and doted on, he excelled at both P.S. 161
> and Boys High School,
> from which he graduated in 1939. The next fall he
> enrolled as a
> 16-year-old freshman at Harvard, where he showed up
> wearing a newly
> purchased outfit of gold-brown jacket,
> green-and-blue striped pants, and
> white saddle shoes. Classmates remembered him as
> brash and jug-eared and
> full of big talk about his sexual experience. (In
> fact he had had very
> little, a lack he quickly set about rectifying.)
>
> Mr. Mailer intended to major in aeronautical
> engineering, but by the time
> he was a sophomore, he had fallen in love with
> literature. He spent the
> summer reading and rereading James T. Farrell’s
> “Studs Lonigan,” John
> Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and John Dos Passos’s
> “U.S.A.,” and he
> began, or so he claimed, to set himself a daily
> quota of 3,000 words of
> his own, on the theory that this was the way to get
> bad writing out of
> his system. By 1941 he was sufficiently purged to
> win the Story magazine
> prize for best short story written by an
> undergraduate.
>
> Mr. Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943 determined
> on a literary
> career. He began work on a thousand-page novel about
> a mental hospital
> (never published) while waiting to be drafted. He
> was finally called up
> by the Army in the spring of 1944, after marrying
> Bea Silverman, in
> January, and was sent to the Philippines.
>
> Mr. Mailer saw little combat in the war and finished
> his military career
> as a cook in occupied Japan. But his wartime
> experience, and in
> particular a single patrol he made on the island of
> Leyte, became the raw
> material for “The Naked and the Dead,” the book that
> put him on the map.
>
> Mr. Mailer wrote “The Naked and the Dead,” which is
> about a 13-man
> platoon fighting the Japanese on a Pacific atoll, in
> 15
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