Author Norman Mailer, Who Penned 'The Naked and The Dead,' Dead at 84

AP via FOXNews.com ^ | Saturday, November 10, 2007 | AP

[JohnLongIsland]

NEW YORK — Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur, died of renal failure early Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.

[Racehorse]

He was a mediocre writer.

Bill Buckley on Norman Mailer: “If only he would lift his gaze from the world’s genitals.”

Decades have passed since I've read anything by Mailer or even thought about him being alive or dead. Except for one book, I didn't much care for Mailer's work.

But, he was a superb writer.

I think Buckley was right on the matter. Mailer could write but he always seemed to choose subjects and themes a bit too far south of the heart. Which is pretty much why I never read more than one of his books, parts of two others, and a few of his shorter stories in a collected work.

Maybe ten years ago, I had a passing acquaintance with Captain J.D. Stallings, one of the officers from the 112th Cavalry Regimental Combat Team in which Mailer served. Mailer came up on one of those occasions. Captain Stallings said that Mailer had a habit of going missing and when they'd go looking for him, they would always find him hunkered down somewhere . . . writing.

[Leisler]

He was a bs artist.
Middle name, ‘Kingsly’.
Mommas boy.
Washed dishes, laid wire, clerk in the Philippines.
He only seemed tough to wimpy New York lefties.
No one reads him anymore.

How do you have an engineering degree from Harvard and get put into a enlisted unit? How big of a mental head case do you have to be not to be found fit for lording over a tool room in a Air Force base or something?

[fieldmarshaldj]

I’ll be polite and say RIP.

[TalBlack]

There is a world of difference between ‘macho’ and ‘macho-acting’.

[doesnt suffer fools gladly]

Good info here. Mailer was a creep. Now he's a dead creep. Prayers to his loved ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abbott

[joebuck]

While most here came to bury Norman not to praise him; I must acknowledge he was one of my favorite writers in college and I never lost my love of his sometimes wicked, sometimes poetic but always brilliant prose. The Naked and the Dead has not been surpassed as the quintessential war novel and The Executioner’s Song took true cime nonfiction to a level as high as Capote did. While I disagreed with his politics and amorality on every level, I read Armies of the Night at least three times in awe of Mailer’s ability to cut to the chase in a sentence saying more than most writers can in a chapter. Adios Norman, I hope you found salvation in your later years.

[RichardW]

I never could figure out why this guy was important.

[Lurker]

Anais Nin could actually write. So could the Marquis. The other two.....blech.

L

[Racehorse]

I never lost my love of his sometimes wicked, sometimes poetic but always brilliant prose. . . . Mailer’s ability to cut to the chase in a sentence saying more than most writers can in a chapter.

As I wrote above, I didn't much care for the bulk of Mailer's work. I started but did not finish Armies of the Night, for example.

Even in the stuff I did not like and did not finish, I saw that his prose was indeed often brilliant. He could pack not only the essence of something into a sparse phrase or sentence, but his imagery was frequently so three-dimensional you could see and taste it.

[Revolting cat!]

One of Tom Wolfe’s Three Stooges! Two to go.

[AD from SpringBay]

Mixed reviews about Mailer. He said some interesting things about reporters in The Spooky Art. Most here would probably agree with him on his observations.

[james500]

Attempted murder and battered wife syndrome get fewer words than his ‘suspicion of technology’?

“Mailer’s personal life was as turbulent as the times. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed, in her own book, how close she had come to dying.”

...

“Mailer’s suspicion of technology was so deep that while most writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, some 1,500 words a day, in what Newsweek’s Sokolov called “an illegible and curving hand.” When a stranger asked him on a Brooklyn street if he wrote on a computer, he replied, “No, I never learned that,” then added, in a mischevious aside, “but my girl does.””

[Verginius Rufus]

I hadn’t heard that line about the three stooges before. I guessed John Updike might be one of them, but had no idea who the third might be (I don’t read much current fiction). A quick google search turned up Updike and John Irving as the other two.

[wardaddy]

I didn’t much care for him but his writing on forcing anal sex on his girlfriend was a glimpse into his darkness

a narcissist extraordinaire