Norman Mailer

His father was a South African-born accountant, his mother ran a nursing and housekeeping agency, and the family moved from Long Branch, New Jersey, to Brooklyn. He left Boys High for Harvard at 16 in 1939, took an engineering degree, and filled the electives with writing. He graduated with honors in 1943 and married Beatrice Silverman in January 1944, telling his draft board he was at work on an important literary book about the war and should be spared fighting it. The board said no. The Army put him in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry — typist, then wire lineman, then a reconnaissance platoon he volunteered for, on more than two dozen patrols. He wrote Bea 400 letters, which became the novel.

The Naked and the Dead came out in May 1948, held the bestseller list for 62 weeks, sold a million copies in its first year and has never gone out of print. He co-founded The Village Voice in 1955 and wrote a column called Quickly, for slow readers. The White Negro in 1957 and Advertisements for Myself in 1959 gave him a voice. Then the nonfiction: Superman Comes to the Supermarket on Kennedy in 1960, The Armies of the Night on the 1967 Pentagon march, which took a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, and The Fight on Ali in Zaire. The Executioner's Song, a thousand pages on Gary Gilmore, took the 1980 Pulitzer for fiction. He wrote himself into it in the third person, a device taken from The Education of Henry Adams.

After a party at his apartment on November 19, 1960, Mailer stabbed his wife Adele Morales twice with the two-and-a-half-inch penknife he used on his fingernails — once in the chest, once in the back, puncturing the sac around her heart — and told the others in the room to leave her alone. She needed emergency surgery. He was involuntarily committed to Bellevue for 17 days, and when she declined to press charges he pleaded to a reduced assault count and took three years' probation. Twenty years later he pushed for the parole of Jack Abbott, a convict whose prison letters he had helped turn into a book. Six weeks out, Abbott stabbed a 22-year-old waiter named Richard Adan to death. Mailer said in 1992 that he could find nothing in the episode to take pride in.

He died of acute renal failure on November 10, 2007, a month after lung surgery, and is buried at Provincetown. The books have not aged together. The Naked and the Dead sits on the Modern Library's list of the century's hundred best novels, and The Executioner's Song is still what people mean by the nonfiction novel. Much of the rest has thinned. Adele Morales published her account of the marriage in 1997, and the stabbing is now the fact most often attached to his name. The Library of America issued two volumes of his 1960s work in 2018. More than a thousand boxes of his papers sit at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin.

Norman Mailer's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Naked and the Dead book
  Written out of about 400 letters home from the Philippines 1948
• The Village Voice company
  Co-founded with three others. He came in as a silent partner and stayed to write a column 1955
• The White Negro article
  Among the most anthologized and most argued-over essays of the postwar decades 1957
• The Armies of the Night book
  The march on the Pentagon, with himself as a character. Pulitzer and National Book Award 1968
• The Executioner's Song book
  Gary Gilmore and the state of Utah. Pulitzer for fiction 1979
• Harlot's Ghost book
  1,310 pages on the CIA, ending with the words To be continued. He never wrote the sequel 1991

• 1941 aged ~18 Wins Story magazine's college fiction contest at 18
• January 1944 aged 20 Marries Beatrice Silverman days before the draft takes him His argument for a deferment to write about the war had been refused.
• 1945 aged ~22 Volunteers for a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippines More than two dozen patrols in contested territory, and several firefights.
• May 1948 aged 25 The Naked and the Dead is published It was his only novel ever to reach number one.
• 1955 aged ~32 Co-founds The Village Voice
• November 19, 1960 aged 37 Stabs Adele Morales after a party at their apartment Seventeen days at Bellevue, then a guilty plea to a reduced charge and three years' probation.
• 1969 aged ~46 Finishes fourth in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York He ran with Jimmy Breslin on a plan to make the city the 51st state.
• 1981 aged ~58 Jack Abbott, whose parole he championed, kills a waiter six weeks after release
• November 10, 2007 aged 84 Dies in Manhattan of acute renal failure at 84

• Truman Capote 1924–1984
  Writer of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood — an early nonfiction novel. rival in the nonfiction novel
• Tom Wolfe 1930–2018
  New Journalism pioneer whose The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities chronicled American culture. fellow inventor of New Journalism
• Joan Didion 1934–2021
  Essayist and novelist whose precise prose captured the anxiety and disillusionment of American life. reviewed him on the front page
• Muhammad Ali 1942–2016
  Boxing legend and cultural icon known for his athletic brilliance and principled stance against the Vietnam War draft. wrote The Fight about him
• Marilyn Monroe 1926–1962
  Actress and cultural icon whose blend of vulnerability and glamour made her a symbol of Hollywood's golden age. wrote a speculative biography of her
• Gloria Steinem b. 1934
  Writer and organizer who became one of the most visible leaders of second-wave feminism. urged him to run for mayor