Author Norman Mailer dies at 84

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He probably would not have wanted an old man's death. He would have preferred some other way: an accident or a bar fight or a lover's brawl. So that his death, like his remarkable life, could inspire or appall and above all, cause people to talk.

But Norman Mailer, a giant of American literature and one of the world's greatest writing talents, died today in a New York hospital bed, finally succumbing to renal failure. Just a few months earlier he had had an operation on his lungs to remove scar tissue. He was 84.

It was a quiet end to one of the loudest and most controversial voices in American letters. In a career that spanned from the second world war to the "war on terror" Mailer's personal controversies never kept his name far from the headlines in a career as a novelist, writer, journalist and film director.

Tributes poured in from his fellow literary greats. "He was a great American voice," said author Joan Didion. Others celebrated his ability to outrage and inform in equal measure on just about any subject. "He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive. He had serious opinions of everything there was to have an opinion on and everything he said was so original," said his friend and fellow writer William Kennedy, author of Ironweed.

New Jersey-born Mailer was renowned for hard-living, womanising, drugs and fist-fights. He had nine children from six wives, including one wife he nearly fatally stabbed in a drunken fight at a party. His career took in such bizarre incidents as running for Mayor of New York city in a bid to make his beloved metropolis the 51st state and once biting off part of the ear of the actor Rip Torn.

But, when all the dust dies down on his pugnacious life and career it is his writing that will still be remembered. His works include such classics as The Naked and the Dead, perhaps his greatest novel, which is set during the second world war in the Pacific and was inspired by his own experiences as a soldier.

That work led him to be hailed as a new Ernest Hemingway, an accolade that Mailer never shied away from. His subsequent books, whether fiction or non-fiction, had a more chequered reception. Some were panned by critics and readers. Others were loved. Many generated both reactions. But as the 1960s and 1970s played out Mailer's public persona became one of a leader of "hipsterdom" in New York, playing with avant garde culture, black power, drugs and being a co-founder of the New York alternative newspaper The Village Voice.

He wrote superbly about the politics (both sexual and governmental) of his day. His 1968 account of a peace march on the Pentagon called Armies of the Night won him a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. But perhaps his greatest work was his 1979 epic The Executioner's Song, about the life and death of a criminal, Gary Gilmore. The book won him his second Pulitzer and is seen as a masterpiece of reportage, fiction and stylistic writing.

Mailer kept writing to the end of his life. Before he died he was working on a follow-up to his last novel, The Castle in the Forest, a fictionalised account of the life of Adolf Hitler. That had been his first novel in a decade and was well reviewed. The New York Times called it "remarkable". His last book, called "On God: An Uncommon Conversation" was published just last month.

But it was for his public persona as much as his publications that Mailer was also best known. Controversy dogged him at every step of his larger than life career, not least because Mailer held himself so openly in high regard and was not shy of speaking his mind. He outraged feminists with his attacks on women's liberation. He disdained the impact of technology and wrote with a pen not a typewriter or computer. He brawled and bragged and drank and smoked pot. In 1960 he was committed to New York's Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric ward for 15 days. After stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife during a drunken binge at a launch party for his mayoral campaign he got a suspended jail sentence.

But his greatest and most damaging controversy concerned his literary adoption of a prisoner, Jack Henry Abbott. Mailer and Abbott exchanged letters and Mailer spotted some degree of talent in the convicted murderer's writings. Mailer helped persuade the Utah Parole Board to free Abbott and he became a sensation among leftwing literary circles. However, Abbott killed again just a month after leaving prison causing widespread condemnation of Mailer's role in setting him free.

Mailer received a Gold Medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards in 2005 and used the occasion to lament the decline of the role of the novelist in public life. He claimed that he feared no one had been inspired by his work in the way that Hemingway's work and life had inspired him. But unlike his hero, Mailer did not die a violent or dramatic end. His health gradually got worse, suffering from arthritis, deafness and using a walking stick to get around.

His prodigious work rate declined from 10 hours a day to three or four hours in the afternoon. But still he kept writing on any subject he cared to address. He had done it all his life. "He never thought the boundaries were restricted. He'd go anywhere and try anything. He was a courageous person, a great person, fully confident, with a great sense of optimism," said author Gay Talese. A private ceremony will take place later this week and plans for a New York memorial service are likely to be announced in the next few months.

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Paul Harris

The GuardianTramp

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