Mailer, Norman Kingsley

US writer and journalist. One of the most prominent figures of post-war American literature, he gained wide attention with his first, best-selling book The Naked and the Dead (1948), a naturalistic war novel. His later works, which use sexual and scatological material, show his personal engagement with history, politics, and psychology. A combative public figure, Mailer co-founded the newspaper The Village Voice in 1955, edited Dissent magazine, and in 1969 ran for mayor of New York City.

His essay ‘White Negro’ in Advertisements for Myself (1959), defining the ‘hipster’ hero, was a seminal statement of the artistic need to rebel against cultural conformity. Always a pugnacious and controversial writer, his polemics on the theory and practice of violence-as-sex brought him into direct conflict with feminist Kate Millett in a series of celebrated debates during the 1970s.

His other books include his dark thriller of sex and power An American Dream (1965), the fictionalized antiwar journalism of The Armies of the Night (1968, Pulitzer Prize), the anti-hero biographies The Executioner's Song (1979, Pulitzer Prize), about convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, and Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (1995), about John F Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald; and two massive novels, Ancient Evenings (1983), dealing with Egyptian life and mythologies, and Harlot's Ghost (1991), about the CIA. His final novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), is a fictionalized account of Adolph Hitler's childhood.