Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn-born and -bred writer who fought for whathe characterized as the "heavyweight championship" of American lettersafter the 1961 death ofErnest Hemingway, never came close tohis dream of writing the Great American novel, but he was a colossus ofAmerican culture and literature in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. When hedied in 2007 at the age of 84, Mailer towered above all other Americanwriters of his and subsequent generations,according to his "New YorkTimes" obituary. A primal life force whose writing elucidated the humancondition among America and Americans better than any of hiscontemporaries for better than three decades, Mailer likely will rankwithHerman Melville and Hemingway asamong the greatest writers produced by the United States. Althoughdenied the Nobel Prize that he had long coveted (winner of two PulitzerPrizes, Mailer believed that the near-fatal stabbing of his second-wifeAdele Morales by himself in 1960 attributed to his failure to win thebig prize), Mailer will be the writer that future generations go to tounderstand the America of the late 1940s through at least the early'80s. "Advertisements for Myself" (1959),"An American Dream (1966)"(1965), "The Armies of the Night" (1969) and "Executioners Song, The(1980) (TV)_" -- one compendium of odds and ends interlaced withMailer's musings, one novel, and two books of "journalism" that heclassified as novels -- will be mandatory on the reading lists ofuniversities 100 years in the future.

Norman Mailer was born in January 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, toFanny (Schneider), who ran a nursing/housekeeping agency, and IsaacBarnett Mailer, an accountant. His family was Jewish. Mailer enteredHarvard College in 1939 at the age of 16 to study engineering at a timewhen there was still a quota on Jews at the Ivy League universities, tokeep them the province of the WASPs that still controlled the controlup to and through World War II. (Mailer would be a commentator on WASPsand their loosening grip on America and American culture in thepost-World War II period. He saw the space project and the landing of aman on the moon as the apotheosis of WASP culture.) He fell in lovewith literature at Harvard, and began his first attempts at creativewriting. Mailer took his degree in 1943, was drafted into the Army thefollowing year and served briefly with a rifle company in thePhilippines. His experiences as an infantryman would be the genesis ofhis 1948 novel "The Naked and The Dead", one of the first of the WorldWar II novels written by the men who had fought it.

Mailer would never have termed the generation that went to war in1941-45 "The Greatest Generation", a concept alien to such post-warwriters as Mailer's erstwhile friend James Jones (author of "From Hereto Eternity", "Catch-22" author Joseph Heller, or populist AmericanhistorianHoward Zinn, all of whomserved in the War. The officers and enlisted men of Mailer's novel "TheNaked and the Dead" are not saints, nor are they on noble missions, letalone quests for something as abstract as "democracy". Democracy is nota staple of Norman Mailer's Army. The officers, as a class, representan insidious form of fascism -- in kind, if not degree -- in this waragainst fascism. Published in 1948, "The Naked and The Dead" was abestseller and made its 25 year old author famous and relativelywell-off, financially. Mailer would never have to toil at any craftother than writing for the rest of the nearly 60 years allotted to him.His next two novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "The Deer Park" (1954)were artistic and commercial failures. For 10 years after thepublication of "The Deer Park" until "An American Dream" (serialized in"Esquire Magazine" in 1964, rewritten and published as a novel in1965), Mailer eschewed tackling another novel. Instead, he turned tojournalism and revolutionized what had been one of the ghettos ofAmerican letters. If there had been no Norman Mailer, perhaps therewould have been a "New Journalism", but it would have been poorer as hewas its greatest exponent. "New Journalism" was a moniker hung on aparticularly personal type of reflection added to the pedantic Who,What, Where & How? of traditional reporting. Rather than exile himselffrom the story in the interest of an impossible-to-obtain "neutrality"that is so dear to the mainstream American newspaper and magazineculture currying favor with advertisers beyond the truss & bodybuilding equipment slums of the old "Men's magazines", Mailer injectedhimself into the story and wrote about how he was effected by events.His seminal article about the 1960 Democratic National Convention inLos Angeles, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (Superman beingJohn F. Kennedy and the Supermarket theLos Angeles where the DNC was held, as well as the new post-War Americaat large") might very well be considered as the starting point of theNew Journalism. The article was published in the November 1960 issue of"Esquire Magazine."Tom Wolfe andother masters of the "New Journalism," which stressed a kind ofirreverence towards the subject, soon followed.

In an American society that is still enthralled to Victorian-eraconcepts of class (Virginia Woolf denounced authors who wrote formoney, a reflection of the aristocratic disdain for anyone who maderather than inherited money as vulgarians whose seed was tainted bycontact with the till), Mailer's achievement was looked down upon.Rather than being hailed for revolutionizing American letters, Mailerwas treated patronizingly by the Literary Establishment. Yet, theserious literary novel now is as nearly dead as all the Cassandras ofthe 1960s and '70s prognosticated, replaced by "non-fiction" memoirs,in which writers no longer hide behind fictive personas to tellstories, but take full-credit for living lives as full of foulincidents as any novel ever published. (That many of these "true tales"are fiction is beside the point.) Ironically, Norman Mailer, who longedto write the Great American novel, likely must bear the lion's share ofresponsibility for the death of the novel and the rise of theconfessional "non-fiction" book, as he elevated "mere journalism" intoan art form. Reporting became and art when Mailer married his beautifulwriting with naked confession that made him a world-class celebrity inthe 1960s and '70s, featured as a regular staple on television talkshows. Simply put, without Norman Mailer, there would not be Americanliterature as we know it.

As concerns Hollywood, Mailer wrote a novel about Hollywood ("The DeerPark") and the first "serious" biography ofMarilyn Monroe, which got him (andMonroe) the cover of the July 16 1973 edition of "Time Magazine." Hemade three improvisational films in the late 1960s:Wild 90 (1968),Beyond the Law (1968) andMaidstone (1970) and directed the 1987adaptation of his own neo-noir novelTough Guys Don't Dance (1987).He despised the 1958 movie made fromRasha to shisha (1958),but had better luck with死刑執行人 (1982)(1979), for which he wrote the screenplay for the 1982 telefilm. In1983, Mailer was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in aLimited Series or a Special for his work, three years after his 1979"novel" (Mailer had characterized his "The Armies of the Night" as "Thenovel as history, history as a novel") had won him his second PulitzerPrize, for Fiction. ("Armies" had conquered him his first, for GeneralNon-Fictionm in 1969.)

Norman Mailer died of acute renal failure at New York City's SinaiHospital on November 10, 2007. He was 84 years old.