Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer was born to a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey on January 31, 1923. Over his 59-year span as a writer he wrote 12 novels. The one I read first, and perhaps the only one I completed, was The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, and was based on his time in the Philippine Campaign during World War II. My father was in the Pacific during World War II, and Norman's book gave me idea of what my Dad must have endured, better than his stories that were cleaned up when told to me growing up.
The Naked and the Dead made him famous at 25 years old, and was considered by Robert Schoenvogel in “20th-Century American Bestsellers” as one of the finest depictions of Americans in combat in World War II.
Norman Mailer went on to be an acclaimed journalist as well as a writer for the screen and books, with his most praised novel being The Executioner's Song, about the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore.
As a man, he was complex, and had an enormous ego.He was both a doting father and a philandering husband with six wives and nine children overall. He was a social activist, a pugilist, sometimes abusive and against women's liberation. He won two Pulitzer Awards during his long career, and towards the end of hews life exhibited at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown, MA.
Theodore Dresier