Norman Mailer died this morning

A true literary giant has passed.

NEW YORK - Norman Mailer, the macho 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," died Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.

Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author's official biographer.

From his classic debut novel 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.


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I've long been a Mailer fan. I'm not a "famous writer groupy" but nothing could have stopped me from seeing Mailer when he came to town a year or two ago. I was not disappointed. Barely able to walk, he nonetheless was bright and cogent in his comments.

My favorite Mailer work is
The Armies of the Night, a work of genius. I also admire his other Pulitzer book,
The Executioner's Song. As a young writer, I was very influenced by Mailer's
Advertisements for Myself, which taught me the importance of a writer being both his own best promoter and toughest critic, the writer as "performing self." I recommend this book to writers who lack self-confidence for Mailer's annotations throughout this anthology (which contains the seminal but hard-to-find essay "The White Negro.")

I like his "failed" novels Barbary Shore and The Deer Park better than the critics do but I do not respond to his later fiction. I'm a fan of his controversial and politically incorrect
Prisoner of Sex.

Mailer never lived up to his grand ambition to become our greatest novelist. But he became, I believe, one of our very fine writers, particularly in "creative nonfiction," a genre he helped create. The Armies of the Night is such an extraordinary achievement, his reputation would be solid on this alone.

Mailer was married six times, and I remember reading that his combined alimonies at one time was a million dollars a year, which is why he wrote so much journalism. I'm glad I got to see him before he died. I suspect his reputation will grow as the years pass and his aggressive personality gets forgotten, leaving the work to speak on its own terms.