Author Norman Mailer dies at age 84 http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2208911,00.html Agencies Saturday November 10, 2007 Guardian Unlimited Norman Mailer, the two-times Pulitzer prize winner who was a dominating presence on the US literary scene across seven decades, has died today, his editorial assistant said. He was 84. Mailer had undergone lung surgery in October. In more than 40 books and a torrent of essays, Mailer provoked and enraged readers with his strident views on US political life, and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. From his debut novel, "The Naked and the Dead," to literary journalism such as "The Armies of the Night," Mailer was credited as a writer who possessed insight, passion and originality. Some of Mailer's works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life's quest from the time he soared to the top as a 25-year-old "enfant terrible." Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party. He had nine children, made a bid to become mayor of New York, produced five films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's lib. But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, "in the end it is the writing that will count." Mailer, he wrote, possessed "a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era." --

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