Norman Mailer

By Richard Lacayo

He was just 25 when he became abruptly and unmanageably famous. It was 1948, America was looking for its Great War Novel, and there was Norman Mailer, with his jug-handle ears, his curly hair and The Naked and the Dead. The first of his 10 novels and more than two dozen other titles, it became a huge best seller. But fame soon turned fickle on him, or maybe vice versa. Mailer was too flighty, impious and vainglorious to fill the role of anointed American writer as the '50s conceived it, so for a while his reputation dimmed. But in the decades that followed, he hit his powerful stride with a new kind of metaphysical journalism and The Armies of the Night, his brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning "nonfiction novel" about the October 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon. These were the years of Mailer at his most pyrotechnic, when he took up every kind of public intellectual battle and even ran a boisterous, quixotic and very entertaining campaign for mayor of New York City. A second Pulitzer arrived for The Executioner's Song, the spare and haunting book that came out of the execution of convicted killer Gary Gilmore. There were many other titles after that, most with moments of genius but none with the same sustained power. Nonetheless, an indispensable cultural voice was lost when Mailer died on Nov. 10. There's no one now to take his place with anything like his force and originality of mind. He was 84.