Quiet death at 84 belies the way author Norman Mailer lived
Norman Mailer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote compellingly about sex and violence, conflict and politics, love and war, as the tempests of his personal life complemented the turbulence of his prose, died Saturday. He was 84.
Mr. Mailer, who died of kidney failure at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, achieved literary fame at 25 with his first novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” based on his Army experiences in the Pacific during World War II. The book led The New York Times best-seller list for 19 weeks in 1948 and 1949 and was made into a movie.
The book launched Mr. Mailer on a parallel career as a celebrity who became notorious in many roles. He was widely known as a drinker and brawler, womanizer, political campaigner, social critic, talk-show guest, self-promoter and symbol of male chauvinism. He had six wives and nine children.
In his career as a writer, Mr. Mailer produced novels, essays, social commentaries, movie scripts and nonfiction narratives about national events and public figures. His subjects included ancient Egypt, political conventions, actress Marilyn Monroe, the CIA, Adolf Hitler and the first landing on the moon. He won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes for “The Armies of the Night” (1968), based on his participation in the 1967 march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War.
Mr. Mailer used fictional techniques in “Armies of the Night” to describe his arrest and to address the philosophical underpinnings of the nation’s military involvement in Vietnam. The hybrid genre became known as the New Journalism, the novelistic rendering of factual stories.
He won his second Pulitzer for “The Executioner’s Song” (1979), which he described as a “true life novel” about Gary Gilmore, who in Utah in 1977 became the first convict to be executed in the United States in more than a decade.
Author Sinclair Lewis once called Mr. Mailer the greatest writer of his generation. But critics were neither uniform nor consistent in their evaluations of his work. Orville Prescott of The New York Times praised “The Naked and the Dead” as “the most impressive novel about the second World War that I have ever read.” But Time magazine condemned Mr. Mailer’s second novel, “Barbary Shore” (1951), as “paceless, graceless and tasteless.” When his 1983 novel, “Ancient Evenings,” received tepid reviews, Mr. Mailer responded with full-page newspaper advertisements, juxtaposing the attacks on his book with similar criticism of such classics as “Moby Dick,” “Anna Karenina,” and “Leaves of Grass.” He considered “Ancient Evenings” his finest work.
He broke new ground in political commentary with his 1960 essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” which deftly described the aura of sexuality and romance surrounding Sen. John F. Kennedy. The essay, published in Esquire magazine three weeks before Kennedy’s election as president, helped establish the Kennedy mystique.
“For a heady period, no major public event in the United States seemed complete until Mailer had observed himself observing it,” a Time critic wrote in 1983.
Mr. Mailer made headlines by running for mayor of New York in 1969 on a ticket with columnist Jimmy Breslin. Their slogan: “Vote the scoundrels in.” They finished fourth in a field of five.
There was a mystique of personal violence about Mr. Mailer, which he encouraged. He often wrote about boxing, and liked to spar with boxer Jose Torres, a friend.
Mr. Mailer’s reputation as a rowdy, unpredictable writer was confirmed during a bacchanal at his New York apartment in 1960, when he stabbed his second wife with a penknife. In 1970, while Mr. Mailer was directing the film “Maidstone,” actor Rip Torn attacked him with a hammer. In a fight that lasted several minutes, Mr. Mailer bit off part of Torn’s ear.
Another time, Mr. Mailer punched author Gore Vidal in the mouth after tossing a drink in his face. The confrontation, which Vidal would later call “the night of the tiny fist,” had its origins in a bitter oral battle between Mr. Mailer and leaders of the feminist movement.
Over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, Mr. Mailer asked Gloria Steinem what women had against him. “You might try reading your books,” she told him. Kate Millett, in her 1970 study, “Sexual Politics,” described his prose as “blatantly and comically chauvinist.”
Never one to retreat from a battle, Mr. Mailer declared on a talk show, “Women should be kept in cages.” In a Harper’s Magazine essay titled “The Prisoner of Sex,” he wrote: “The prime responsibility of a woman is to be on Earth long enough to find the best mate for herself and conceive children who will improve the species.”
Vidal then entered the fray with an article in The New York Review of Books, finding “a logical progression” from Henry Miller to Mr. Mailer to Charles Manson.
The two authors later traded insults on television Then, at a 1977 Manhattan dinner party, Mr. Mailer threw his whiskey in Vidal’s face, head-butted him and punched him in the mouth. When the hostess, journalist Lally Weymouth, begged other guests to pull the two apart, Clay Felker, then editor of Esquire, told her, “Shut up. This fight is making your party.”
Norman Kingsley Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J., and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant from South Africa who worked as an accountant.
In September 1939, at 16, Mr. Mailer entered Harvard University. He majored in engineering. He graduated cum laude, but it was also clear that literature and writing were his primary loves.
In his first year at Harvard, Mr. Mailer began writing short stories, one of which won a first prize from Story magazine. After graduating in 1943, he went back home to Brooklyn to work on a novel. In March 1944, one month after his first marriage, he was inducted into the Army, eventually joining the 112th Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Philippines.
He was a rifleman in an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon that engaged in a few skirmishes but saw no heavy action.
After the war ended, he served with occupation forces in Japan and returned to the United States in May 1946. He spent the rest of the year transmuting his military experiences into “The Naked and the Dead.”
His next two novels, “Barbary Shore” (1951) and “Deer Park” (1955), drew hostile reviews.
It would be almost 10 years before he wrote his next novel, “An American Dream,” about a professor of existential psychology who murders his wife. During the intervening decade, Mr. Mailer wrote essays, short stories and commentaries, while becoming increasingly prominent as a public figure. In 1955, he helped found New York’s Village Voice weekly newspaper.
In November 1960, after stabbing his second wife, artist Adele Morales Mailer, during a drunken party, Mr. Mailer spent two weeks in a psychiatric unit of New York’s Bellevue Hospital.
His wife, wounded in the abdomen and back, made a full recovery and declined to press charges. They separated and subsequently divorced.
Eleven years after the 1962 death of actress Marilyn Monroe, Mr. Mailer wrote “Marilyn,” in which he suggested she was murdered by either the FBI, CIA or Mafia because she was “reputed to be having an affair” with Robert F. Kennedy. Parade magazine’s Lloyd Shearer called the book “a shameful, rehashed potboiler.”
With the publication in 1979 of “The Executioner’s Song,” Mr. Mailer recorded his last major literary triumph. Even with its success, he was in dire financial straits because of his many marriages and child-support payments.
One of the most notorious episodes in Mr. Mailer’s career occurred when he championed the literary career of Jack Abbott, a felon who had spent most of his adult life in prison after being convicted of armed robbery and killing a man in prison. After they corresponded for several years, Mr. Mailer helped publish a collection of Abbott’s letters, “In the Belly of the Beast,” in 1981. Mr. Mailer then helped win Abbott’s parole from prison.
Soon after his release, Abbott stabbed a restaurant waiter to death after an argument about using the restroom. Mr. Mailer testified for Abbott at his trial and said he was “sorry as hell about the way it turned out.”
Mr. Mailer’s first marriage, to Bea Silverman, ended in divorce in 1952. He married Adele Morales in 1954 and divorced her in 1962, the same year he married Lady Jeanne Campbell. They divorced in 1963, and he married actress Beverly Bentley that year. They separated in 1970 when Mr. Mailer began living with Carol Stevens, a nightclub singer, but did not divorce until 1980.
Mr. Mailer and Stevens already had separated when he married her in November 1980 to “legitimize,” in his terms, their 9-year-old daughter. Mr. Mailer divorced her immediately and married his sixth wife, artist Norris Church, with whom he already had a son.
His children, who gave him 10 grandchildren, included a daughter from his first marriage; two daughters from his second marriage; a daughter from his third marriage; two sons from his fourth marriage; a daughter from his fifth marriage; two sons from his sixth marriage.
Washington Post reporter Matt Schudel contributed to this report.