RIP Norman Mailer

[BrainGlutton]

Story here.

NEW YORK - Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country’s literary conscience and provocateur with such books as “The Naked and the Dead,” died Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.

<snip>

Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.

He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women’s lib.

But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, “in the end it is the writing that will count.”

Mailer, he wrote, possessed “a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era.”

This means something to me and I’ve never read a single one of his books. He was always there, you know? An iconic Figure.

[Tuckerfan]

Beaten to the punch by several hours.

[C_K_Dexter_Haven]

Since there’s another thread, I’m suggesting people go there, and I’m closing this one.