Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer

Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate. His best work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1980, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mailer's book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award.

Along with the likes of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism.

In 1955, Mailer and three others founded The Village Voice, an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village.

Read more about Norman Mailer:  Early Life, Political Activism, Biographical Subjects, Death and Legacy, Cultural References

Famous quotes by norman mailer:

    What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children’s homes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)