Norman Mailer

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, essayist, journalist, and filmmaker who won the Pulitzer Prize twice and helped shape the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1923 and raised in Brooklyn, he graduated from Harvard with a degree in aeronautical engineering in 1943 and was drafted into the U.S. Army a year later, serving with the 112th Cavalry in the Philippines.

His war experience produced The Naked and the Dead (1948), a six-hundred-page combat novel that reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list when he was twenty-five. He followed it with Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), then turned increasingly to essay and reportage, helping to found The Village Voice in 1955 and publishing the influential collection Advertisements for Myself in 1959.

Mailer won his first Pulitzer in 1969 for The Armies of the Night, his account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, which also took the National Book Award. His second came in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, a thousand-page non-fiction novel about the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore.

He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1969 on a ticket proposing the city's secession from the state. He published more than forty books and died in New York City in November 2007.

The name Norman is a masculine name of Germanic origin meaning "northman" or "man of the north," referring originally to the Norse settlers of Normandy. By the early twentieth century it had become a fashionable Anglo-American given name, and his Lithuanian-Jewish parents chose it to signal their American assimilation in 1920s Brooklyn.