Norman Mailer

A major voice in American literature, Norman Mailer died Saturday at Mount Sinai Hospital. From his classic debut novel "The Naked and The Dead" to such masterworks of literary journalism as "The Armies of the Night," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality. His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, "The Armies of the Night," won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. "The Executioner's Song" (1979), an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, whom Mailer never met, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He wrote much more, not all of it as well received.

In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the "withering" of general interest in the "serious novel."Authors like himself, he said more than once, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism.When he was young, Mailer said, "fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway ... I don't think the same thing can be said anymore. I don't think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me." I have read that he had a great distrust for technology and wrote in long hand--usually about 1500 words a day.

Quotes from Normal Mailer:
"I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
Source: Obituaries in national newspapers