Norman Mailer, 1923 - 2007.

Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation, died today at Mt Sinai Hospital in New York. He was 84.

Mr Mailer burst on the scene in 1948 with The Naked and the Dead, a partly autobiographical novel about World War II, and for the next six decades he was rarely far from the center stage. He published more than 30 books, including novels, biographies and works of nonfiction, and twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for The Armies of the Night (1968), which also won the National Book Award, and The Executioner's Song (1979).

He also wrote, directed, and acted in several low-budget movies, helped found the Village Voice and for many years was a regular guest on television talk shows, where he could reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.

Charles McGrath, New York Times.

Updated through 11/16.

[I]t was nonfiction, not fiction, that would prove his most lasting contribution. The Armies of the Night, his noisy, self-dramatizing account of his own experiences in the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, became a founding document of what Tom Wolfe would call 'the new journalism': nonfiction that possessed all the ardor, attitude and body language of a novel but remained grounded in old-fashioned legwork and observation. It was a genre particularly suited to covering the tumult and cacophonous change abroad in the 60s, a decade so surreal, so stupefying, so confounding, in the view of some, that it surpassed anything a novelist might plausibly imagine.

Michiko Kakutani, NYT.

On the films: Gerald Howard (NYT), Peter Keough (Boston Phoenix), Gerald Peary (Boston Phoenix), Carl Rollyson (Voice) and AO Scott (NYT).

See also: Books and Writers and Wikipedia.

Online listening tip. Don Swaim's 1991 interview.

Updates: The Paris Review has set up a special memorial section with Philip Gourevitch's interview this spring (audio); Andrew O'Hagan interview (plus video of an event with Günter Grass, "The 20th Century on Trial"); Steven Marcus's 1964 interview and Mailer's 1961 interview with himself.

"All through his career Mailer would carry with him a few persistent preoccupations. One was that technology as the devil's instrument, the means by which everything that made us human would be gradually leached away," writes Richard Lacayo in an excellent remembrance for Time. "His other great topic was manhood, and the problem of how to achieve it in a culture subsiding into room temperature.... My favorite Mailer quote will always be this one. 'How dare you scorn the explosive I employ?' Norman come back. Nothing is forgiven."

"He was a grand provocateur with an unapologetically macho sensibility who, in acts on and off the page, reaped more glory, failure and notoriety than any other major writer of his generation," writes Elaine Woo in the Los Angeles Times.

"'When two men pass one another in the street and say "Good morning,"' he once said, 'there's a winner and a loser," writes James Campbell in the Guardian. "And it was a characteristic inseparable from his skill at playing the news-media game, which kept him to the fore of the cultural stage for more than half a century."

Observer literary editor Robert McCrum interviewed Mailer in February.

Online viewing tips. Mailer on Charlie Rose: February 07, January 03, May 98, April 97 and December 96.

Updates, 11/11: "Now would come the final calling to account; not just for the literary legacy of a man who believed that 'a really great novel does not have something to say. It has the ability to stimulate the mind and spirit of the people who come in contact with it', but for a life he had lived on the margins of credibility, packed with so many fights, love affairs and downright violent feuds that it always threatened to overshadow his work." Vanessa Thorpe on the news of Mailer's death. "One of his longest-running battles was with the liberal thinker and writer Gore Vidal. Their dislike for each other often led to violence. In one of their tussles it seems that Vidal came off best. As Mailer threw a punch in his direction, Vidal is said to have quipped dryly: 'Lost for words again, Norman?'"

Also in the Observer, Alexander Linklater recalls Mailer's appearance in a British bookstore in 1997, pulling "out his obituary - written, naturally, by himself. It was a fabulous burlesque of a life peopled by dozens of wives and tribes of children, of creative incontinence and egotism, of his liabilities outweighing his assets by $8m and critics still baying for his blood. The last word was reserved for Andy Warhol: 'I always thought Norman kept a low profile, that's what I liked about him.'" But seriously, folks: "In 1965 Truman Capote's In Cold Blood may have set the standard for thrilling, close observation of the sociology of a crime and the characterisation of its protagonists. But in 1979, with The Executioner's Song, Mailer achieved the more profound novelisation of actuality."

Dana Cook compiles a verbal memorial; Salon's also running AO Scott's entry on Mailer from The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors.

"He was a slugger," writes Louis Menand in the New Yorker. "He swung at everything, and when he missed he missed by a mile and sometimes ended up on his tush, but when he connected he usually knocked it out of the park." Via John Freeman, whose got quite an interview himself at Critical Mass.

In 1986, Roger Ebert visited the set of Tough Guys Don't Dance; via Movie City News.

Ed Champion not buying into "the approbations, the lionizations, the veritable bullshit that Norman Mailer was a gift to the world... Someone needs to do an HST-style obit for the man."

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Flung in the back of a paddy wagon with Noam Chomsky and an American Nazi for company; mixing it up down in the Congo waiting for the Ali-Foreman brawl; running for mayor of New York with Jimmy Breslin as a campaign manager; duking it out with the Stalinist fellow-travelers in the company of his old friend Jean Malaquais, individualist Trotskyist, as intellectual mentor; getting the point of Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song, and appreciating that a stone-cold killer who really wanted to die was the negation of bleeding-heart liberalism and an intuitive curtain-raiser for the Reagan years.

Pint-size Jewish fireplug that he was, Mailer also continually ran a great risk that very few are willing to run. I mean the danger of simply seeming ridiculous.

"He had a great life, a multi-storied career, a molecular-altering impact on postwar culture, and he never tamped down his iconoclasm and risk appetite for a cozy fade into the sunset as a senior statesman of letters," writes James Wolcott.

"I think the greatest American writer of my lifetime so far is probably Philip Roth," writes Phil Nugent. "I always grab Roth's latest whenever it comes out, and I've spent time wondering how it'll feel like, someday, to live in a world without him. I respect and admire him. But I loved Norman Mailer! Mailer wrote a lot of books that I've never had the guts to read; when he was bad he could stink up the whole building, and the ones that look unpromising to me tend to be doorstops." That said, "[N]obody else in his position was honest enough, or vain enough in his peculiar way, to actually detail how many false starts and missteps are involved in becoming a genius."

Esquire's running Tom Junod's profile from its January 07 issue; they claim it's the last to have been done before he died.

Lou Lumenick revisits his 1987 interview with Mailer.

Online listening tip. Over five hours of Mailer on Bookworm.

"When Mailer founded the Voice in 1955 with his friends Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, he had already published three novels, including The Naked and the Dead, a Tolstoy-esque debut novel set during World War II, which sold 200,000 copies in its first three months and instantly brought him a near-universal critical renown," writes Harry Bruinius in that very weekly. "But it was at the Voice, in the handful of cultural and political articles he contributed in 1956, that Mailer first began to develop the outrageously sober-minded and superciliously self-effacing voice that would define his subsequent writing and make him one of the great stylists - and journalists - of his generation."

Updates, 11/12: "Throughout his almost 60-year career, this author was the prophet and pioneer of a culture in which fact and imagination overlapped," writes Mark Lawson in the Guardian. "Mailer steered the journey to a world where journalism and documentary routinely borrow the techniques of fiction, while a majority of movies and plays seem to be biographical and novels regularly conclude with extensive lists of the volumes consulted as research."

Mike Everleth suggests that there are ways you can get your hands on Mailer's movies.

Dwight Garner has posted a brief but very fine appreciation.

"Calling ego 'the buzzword of the century,' Mailer boldly explored his passions in nine different decades, leaving behind a secret second body of work — amazing stories about the story-teller's life." Destiny rounds up a few at 10 Zen Monkeys.

Another online listening tip: a 1991 interview on Fresh Air.

And another online viewing tip. Mailer faces off against Marshall McLuhan on The Summer Way. The year is 1968, and they both start off sounding pretty freaky before they calm down. Via Fimoculous.

"Of the generation of American novelists recently passed - Bellow, Styron, Vonnegut - none is harder to come to terms with than Norman Mailer," argues Jim Lewis. "In part that is because his celebrity is nearly unimaginable today, and in part because his personality was so outsized; but mostly it's because no great writer - and he was, at his best, as great as he said he was - ever wrote quite as much crap." And Slate gathers links to all its other Mailer pieces, too, at one handy URL.

Updates, 11/13: "Since the existence of an afterlife was one of the things we both agreed on, I'm going to assume he's now fully ensconced in it, and has already got a few feuds going - including one with God," writes Arianna Huffington. "If only I could get him to blog about it." And the Huffington Post has set up a "Norman Mailer Memorial."

"More grand reactionary than great writer, Mailer was a faux-radical who used the taboo-breaking atmosphere of the 60s as cover for a career of lifelong self-promotion," argues Joan Smith in the Guardian.

The New Republic gathers its Mailer pieces.

Updates, 11/14: The New York Observer has a four-piece tribute.

John Walsh in the Independent: "[I]t was an ideal that brought with it a holy grail: that of a single perfect work of fiction that would encapsulate the heart of the US, interpret its history through the light of a single, outstanding consciousness, unite the private lives of the characters with the public drama of its politics. It would be the War and Peace of the great plains and the Manhattan skyline. It would be the Great American Novel. Mailer believed in it utterly."

In 1979, Boston Magazine asked Mailer (as they'd asked others) to write his own obit; now the magazine's running that "hilarious and contentious" piece online. Via Dwight Garner.

Update, 11/15: Dick Cavett recalls "without doubt the damnedest show I ever did." Then, after the transcript and a few comments: "I know someone who sure as hell hates being dead."

Update, 11/16: In the LA CityBeat, Anthony Miller recalls Mailer's last visit to the city in June. "[H]e had words for those who too easily equated the situation in Iraq with Vietnam, cast a cold eye on television and its baleful effect on generations of readers, and took shots at a few political figures. Novelist Bruce Bauman, who grew up reading Mailer, was at the Dorothy Chandler that night. For him, Mailer was 'a supreme prose stylist with prodigious powers that portrayed the conflicts of the human soul and peered into the darkness of his time, often with great humor, as profoundly as any writer of his generation.'"

Posted by dwhudson at November 10, 2007 6:26 AM