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Letter to the editor

'He was much more' than a writer

The American icon and Pulitzer winner demanded center stage.

By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Book Editor
Published November 11, 2007

Not only was Norman Mailer one of the great American writers of the 20th century, he also shaped how our culture sees writers.

Mr. Mailer died of renal failure early Saturday morning Nov. 10, 2007 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. At 84, he had been in failing health for several years, undergoing lung surgery a month ago.

But that had not stopped his prodigious flow of words. He published two books in the last nine months, a novel about Hitler, The Castle in the Forest, in February, and a nonfiction book about religion, On God: An Uncommon Conversation, in October.

They capped a stream of more than three dozen books that started with The Naked and the Dead, a gritty World War II novel published in 1948, when Mr. Mailer was 25. It was a sensation, and so was its brash, brilliant author.

He wrote in every genre: fiction, journalism, biography, plays, film scripts. He was one of the creators of the form variously called new journalism and creative nonfiction, and one of its finest practitioners. His two Pulitzer Prizes were forThe Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song (1979).

Celebrity fascinated Mr. Mailer, not least because he experienced it from the inside. One of his best-known books was titled Advertisements for Myself, and he wasn't kidding. He was always larger than life, and the stereotype of the writer as a retiring, contemplative soul never suited him.

Mr. Mailer was always a public figure, whether running for mayor of New York, protesting wars from Vietnam to Iraq, helping to found the Village Voice, acting in movies or appearing in countless television interviews, often sparring with other authors, from Gore Vidal to Germaine Greer.

He married six times and had nine children. He was infamous for stabbing his second wife while drunk at a party, but his last marriage, to painter-writer Norris Church, who survives him, lasted 27 years. His friendships ranged widely: boxers, fashion designers, intellectuals, actors. His interests ranged even further.

'A man of letters'

"He was much more than just a novelist," said Philip Sipiora, a professor in the department of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Sipiora is the editor of the Mailer Journal, a literary review devoted to the author. Its first issue was published in October.

Sipiora knew the author personally as well as academically. "Mailer was a man of letters in the larger sense, a full-fledged intellectual on so many fronts."

Sipiora said it's too early to predict whether the author will be better known for his fiction or nonfiction. Mr. Mailer published 12 novels, but in the writer's archives are 11 more. "At some point those will be published," possibly changing the shape of Mr. Mailer's legacy. But it may come down to whether "his words or his image dominate in the next couple of generations."

There has always been a synergy between Mr. Mailer's public image and his work, Sipiora said: "The Naked and the Dead made Norman Mailer, and Norman Mailer made The Naked and the Dead."

In a century when the written word was competing as never before with other media, Mr. Mailer made over the image of the American writer as well. Like Ernest Hemingway before him, Sipiora said, he was a "cultural icon." But Mr. Mailer expanded that icon status into realms that Hemingway - whose famous machismo included a disdain for the intellectual and political - never ventured into.

Mr. Mailer insisted throughout his long, sometimes illustrious, sometimes notorious career that he belonged on center stage just as much as any actor or politician did. But it wasn't just about his ego. It was an assertion of the value of writers, of the vital role of literature, of the importance of the life of the mind in the life of the nation.

He didn't care whether his readers agreed with him. He cared whether he could make us think.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancrotf@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435.

[Last modified November 10, 2007, 23:14:20]