Norman Mailer

Who was Norman Mailer?

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate. His first novel was The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948. His best work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1979, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mailer's book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award.

Along with the likes of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism.

Mailer was also known for his essays, the most renowned of which was The White Negro. He was a major cultural commentator and critic, both through his novels, his journalism, his essays and his frequent media appearances.

In 1955, Mailer and three others founded The Village Voice, an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village.

Famous Quotes:

• Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
• In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
• The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
• There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
• The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
• A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
• I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
• Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
• I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
• In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.