Norman Mailer is born
Novelist Norman Mailer is born in Long Branch New Jersey on this day in 1923.Mailer grew up in Brooklyn and attended Harvard.During World War II he joined the army then studied at the Sorbonne where he wrote his first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) based on his own experiences in the Army.
The book which closely chronicles the lives of 13 soldiers stationed in the Pacific became a popular and critical success.Mailers next two books Barbaray Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955) were savaged by critics but his subsequent journalistic memoirs fared better.The Armies of the Night (1968) a memoir of his participation in the famous Washington D.C.peace march of 1967 won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the National Book Award in 1969.
His novel The Executioners Song a fictionalized account of the life of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1980.In 1991 his four-pound novel Harlots Ghost explored the CIA from 1948 through the Kennedy administration.Mailers reputation as a hard-drinking tough-talking anti-feminist made him a controversial literary figure in the 1970s and 1980s.His high-profile exploits included drinking binges the alleged stabbing of his second wife at a party and running for mayor of New York City.
The father of nine children by six wives he died on November 10 2007 at 84.
