✦ Mortalbook
← Remembered
Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer

January 31, 1923 –November 10, 2007

Journalist, Actor, Film director, Screenwriter, Novelist, Essayist

Lived 84 years

Born in
Long Branch
Passed away in
New York City

Nachem Malech Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007), known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American writer, journalist, and filmmaker. In a career spanning more than six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II.

His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948 and brought him early renown. His 1968 nonfiction novel The Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction as well as the National Book Award. Among his other well-known works are An American Dream (1965), The Fight (1975) and The Executioner's Song (1979), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Mailer is considered an innovator of "creative nonfiction" or "New Journalism", along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, a genre that uses the style and devices of literary fiction in factual journalism. He was a prominent cultural commentator and critic, expressing his often controversial views through his novels, journalism, frequent press appearances, and essays, the most famous and reprinted of which is "The White Negro". In 1955, he and three others founded The Village Voice, an arts and politics-oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village.

In 1960, Mailer was convicted of assault and served a three-year probation after he stabbed his wife Adele Morales with a penknife, nearly killing her. In 1969, he ran an unsuccessful campaign to become the mayor of New York, finishing fourth in the Democratic primaries. Mailer was married six times and had nine children.

Awards: National Book Award, George Polk Award, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Helmerich Award, Emerson-Thoreau Medal, Legion of Honour, Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres‎, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Education: University of Paris, Harvard University, Boys High School, Boys and Girls High School

Source: Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer