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:

    One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
    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)

    Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitions ... he has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover’s sense of the moment of crisis, and he knew ... how costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.
    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)