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Just yesterday, I found out the bad news. Norman Mailer, one of the greatest writers in American history, passed away from acute renal failure after having lung surgery in New York at Mt. Sinai Hospital. He was eighty-four years old. It was an end of an era, one of the last great writers alive now gone. Just this year, Kurt Vonnegut passed away in May, another great writer, now Norman Mailer is gone. Also like Vonnegut, I never really got a chance to read anything by Norman Mailer, although I have heard much about him. He was the writer of the book, The Naked and the Dead, which is on the list of the Twentieth Century’s Top One Hundred Books. He was married six times, which to me is way too much. Also, Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on Jan. 31, 1923 in a Jewish family. His father was an accountant born in South Africa, and his mother owned a housekeeping and nursing agency. Mailer grew up in Brooklyn, where he graduated from Boys’ High School in 1939 and went to Harvard University to study aeronautical engineering. It was in Harvard where he got interested in writing and began to publish stories for their inquiry. Also, Mailer would marry his first wife, Beatrice Silverman. When Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943, he was drafted into the Army and served in the Philippines till the war’s end. In 1948, Mailer would publish his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, an account to his personal experiences in World War II. It would be one of the first books written in part of a new genre at the time called New Journalism, or creative nonfiction. The book would also make Mailer a star, making it on the New York Times Best Seller List. It would be a terrific start of a great writing career. Following The Naked and the Dead, Mailer would release his next book, Barbary Shore, in 1951. The book was about a surreal parable of Cold War left politics set in a Brooklyn rooming house. The following year, he divorced Beatrice Silverman, and began working as a screenwriter in Hollywood. In 1954, Mailer would marry a second time to Adele Morales. His next book, Deer Park, based on his experiences in Hollywood, was rejected by six publishers due to it’s sexual content until it was published in 1955. By then, Mailer was known for his essay work on the growing counter-culture in the US, and would help found The Village Voice, a free newspaper that would be seen much in the Greenwich Village in New York and in San Francisco. Mailer would continue into essays and would release them in his next book, Advertisements for Myself, in 1959. The next year, during a party, Mailer and his wife Adele got into a fight and Mailer ended up stabbing her with a penknife. The incident started due to an argument about Mailer’s work on sexual violence, which Adele would publish a memoir on their marriage in 1997 called The Last Party that explained the accident in detail. He would divorce her following the incident, then would remarry in 1962 to Lady Jeanne Campbell, a British heiress and journalist, then divorced her the following year. Mailer would then marry again in 1963 to Beverly Bentley. The rest of the decade saw Mailer go into many different projects; he would cover the Republican and Democratic conventions in every presidential election year, released books such as The Presidential Papers in 1963, An American Dream in 1965, which was the sequel to The Naked and the Dead, Armies of the Night in 1968, which won him a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. In 1967, Mailer was arrested for his involvement in Anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Also, for his reporting in the Harper Magazine, he was awarded the George Polk Award in 1968. In the late 1960’s too saw him work on a play version of his novel Deer Park, and directing a number of avant-garde films using an Andy Warhol improvisational style, which included Maidstone in 1970. In 1969, Mailer would run unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York City for the Democratic Party, proposing a succession from the state of New York to make the city into the fifty-first state. The decade of the 1970’s would see a continuation of what Mailer started in the late 1960’s, he would publish novels Of a Fire on the Moon in 1970, The Prisoner of Sex in 1971, Marilyn in 1973, The Fight in 1975, and The Executioner’s Song in 1979, which he awarded for the Pulitzer Prize. Marilyn was his first biography topic for a book, which he would later do a few more including Pablo Picasso and Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1980, Mailer spearheaded the release of convicted killer Jack Abbott, for which Abbott sent letters to Mailer about his experience in prison. Abbott was released on parole, then a few weeks later committed another murder. For his role to release him, Mailer was strongly criticized for many years. He would later say it was another moment in his life that he finds nothing to cheer about of take pride in. Also in 1980, he would get divorced to Beverly Bentley, and marry again to Carol Stevens, which they separated a day after the wedding and then got divorced later on. Mailer would yet again marry in 1980, which would be his last wife Norris Church. Mailer had a total of eight biological children, whom many of them became actors and actresses. He would adopt another child, which was Norris Church’s son from her first marriage. Mailer would still continue on writing and making films all through the 1980’s and 1990’s, with works including Ancient Evenings in 1983, Harlot’s Ghost in 1991, and Oswald’s Tale in 1995. In 1987, he adapted his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance in a movie, which starred Ryan O’Neal. It would end up having a strong cult success. In his last years, he would co-write the novel The Big Empty with his youngest son John Buffalo in 2005, and his last novel The Castle in the Forest was published shortly before his death. Norman Mailer’s legacy as writer, director, activist and so on will live on in our society. Like Vonnegut and Capote, he questioned governmental issues and stood up when no one else would. He will be missed.
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