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:
“So we think of Marilyn who was every man’s love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that ‘Nobody is any better than he ought to be.’... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“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 final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“The Frenchman Jean-Paul ... Sartre I remember now was his last name had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)