User:Grlucas/Norman Mailer: Important Dates



Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, political activist, and public intellectual. Mailer came to prominence with the publication of his 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead. His career spans the latter half of the twentieth-century, and his outspoken opinions and ideas were heard on almost every major television talk show and in every major magazine worldwide. He published over forty books in his lifetime, and even helped to pioneer New Journalism in the sixties: a new way to perceive the unique events of the era, weaving conventional reporting with fictional techniques. While he published in almost every literary genre, he was also a well-known public intellectual and a would-be politician who held controversial opinions about women, sex, violence, power, technology, and writing. Mailer tried his hand at journalism, film-making, biography, playwriting, sports reporting, and he participated in hundreds of rallies, interviews, protests, and debates that helped shape American culture of the twentieth century.

Born in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1923 to Jewish immigrant parents, Mailer grew up in Brooklyn. He graduated from Harvard in 1943, where he studied engineering, and entered the U.S. Army soon after. He served as a rifleman and cook in the Pacific theater from 1944–46, and attended the Sorbonne in Paris following the war. A co-founder of The Village Voice in 1955, Mailer also wrote for Life, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper's, Partisan Review, Paris Review, and Vanity Fair, as well as many counterculture and underground publications.

Mailer is the only major American author to have bestsellers in six consecutive decades. Some of his major novels are: The Deer Park (1955), An American Dream (1965), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), Ancient Evenings (1983), and Harlot's Ghost (1991). In 1969, his nonfiction narrative The Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Mailer ran for the mayor of New York City. Mailer won his second Pulitzer in 1979 for The Executioner's Song.

For the last 33 years of his life, Mailer lived in Brooklyn, NY, and Provincetown, MA, with his wife Norris Church Mailer. He was married six times and fathered nine children.

The following is an overview of important events in Mailer's life.