Norman Mailer, a two-time Pulitzer prize winner, has passed away at the age of 84.
It seems that Mailer was an advocate of the ‘Here for a good time, not a long time’ lifestyle. He was married six times, fathered nine children, is rumoured to have abused alcohol and drugs and liked to carry his college boxing career into his professional life more than once. Mailer recieved a suspended sentence for stabbing his second wife at a party and feuded with fellow well-known authors such as Truman Capote and Gore Vidal.
Although Mailer did not win a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel The Naked and the Dead, this is widely regarded as the best account of World War II and catapulted Mailer to celebrity status at the tender age of 25. It is based on his personal experience of war.
Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for Armies of the Night, an account of the 1967 march on the Pentagon by anti-Vietnam War protesters, established him as a political spokesman for the Woodstock generation. His second Pulitzer was for The Executioner’s Song detailing the execution of Gary Gilmore in Utah.
Mailer was not only a talented writer, he began studying aeronautical engineering at Harvard University at 16. Mailer’s most recent book The Castle in the Forest recount’s Adolf Hitler’s childhood was released this year.
