Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mailer dies at 84

LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY

NEW YORK — Norman Mailer, the author whose name was synonymous with literary celebrity in the second half of the 20th century, died Saturday at the age of 84.

Mailer died of renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, Mailer’s biographer.

Mailer won two Pulitzer Prizes, for “The Armies of the Night” in 1969 and “The Executioner’s Song” in 1980. He also won a National Book Award for “The Armies of the Night,” and in 2005 was awarded a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation.

With an eye toward his legacy, Mailer sold his vast archives — 20,000 pounds of letters, manuscripts and memorabilia — to a research center at the University of Texas, for $2.5 million in 2005. In a February interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said he was feeling his age and the pressure of mortality. “I have all sorts of regrets,” he said. “I regret all the novels I promised to write but never wrote.” However, he said, he also believed in reincarnation, which he called “a way for God to improve his earlier works.”

Because he led such a high-profile and tumultuous public life, Mailer was probably the best-known writer in America. Among critics and fellow writers, he was considered a writer whose achievements, however admirable, never quite matched his enormous literary gifts.

Still, his so-called nonfiction novels, notably “The Armies of the Night” (1968) and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979), stand among the most celebrated books of the past 50 years.

Mailer had nine children and six wives. Although his last marriage, with Norris Church, was fairly placid, his unions were marred by infidelity and public shouting matches.

Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J. He graduated from Boys’ High in Brooklyn and enrolled at Harvard to study aeronautical engineering. While there, his interests shifted to writing and he soon distinguished himself on the college literary magazine. After graduation in 1943 he joined the U.S. Army.

In 1949, with the publication of his first novel, “The Naked and Dead,” which drew on his wartime experience in the Philippines, Mailer was hailed as a novelist of great potential. He was only 25.

This year, he published his first novel in 10 years. “The Castle in the Forest” is a fictional account of Hitler’s boyhood told through the eyes of a devil whose job is to foster young Adolf’s evil. The book — Mailer’s 13th novel — was just released as a paperback.