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:

    Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today.... We’re all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)