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Author Norman Mailer, 84, dies in New York

Norman Mailer reflects on turning 80 during an interview in his Brooklyn Heights apartment in New York on Jan. 28, 2003. PHOTO: AP

Norman Mailer, the pugnacious prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner's Song, has died at the age of 84.

Mailer died on Saturday of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, the author's literary executor and biographer.

"He was a great American voice," said a tearful Joan Didion, author of The Year of Magical Thinking, struggling for words upon learning of Mailer's death.

From The Naked and the Dead, his classic debut novel about a combat platoon in the South Pacific during World War II, to such masterworks of literary journalism as The Armies of the Night, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.

Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old "enfant terrible."

Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as bellicose, street-wise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked marijuana, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.

He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York City on a "left conservative" platform, produced five films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan Young Women's Hebrew Association, a Jewish community center for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's liberation.

Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the Pentagon protests in the late 1960s. While directing the film Maidstone in 1968, the self-described "old club fighter" punched actor Lane Smith, breaking his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn's ear in another scuffle.

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."

Norman Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, moved to Brooklyn soon after.
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