Norman Mailer Biography Quotes 38 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Norman Kingsley Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. From an early age he showed an aptitude for writing and for argument, a combination that would define his public life as much as his books. He studied at Harvard College, where he majored in engineering but devoted his energy to fiction and campus literary life. A prize-winning short story while still an undergraduate signaled his ambitions and attracted early attention to his talent.

War Service and First Success
Drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II, Mailer served in the Pacific, an experience that provided the raw material for his breakthrough novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948). Written in his mid-twenties, the book was an immediate sensation, praised for its panoramic realism and psychological depth. It made him, overnight, one of the most famous young novelists in America. The sudden renown placed him beside leading postwar voices and began a lifelong negotiation between literary craft and public performance.

Fiction, Experiment, and Cultural Reputation
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Mailer pursued an audacious range of subjects and styles. The Deer Park explored the corrosions of Hollywood culture; Advertisements for Myself collected essays and fiction that announced his manifesto-like ambitions and combative persona. An American Dream brought a feverish, transgressive edge to his fiction, while Why Are We in Vietnam? channeled the anxieties of a nation sliding into war. His work increasingly blended reportage, memoir, and novelistic technique, insisting that the author himself was a character and that public events could be rendered with the intensity of a novel.

New Journalism and Political Engagement
Mailer emerged as a central figure in the evolution of New Journalism, a movement that included Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and others who drew on techniques of fiction to cover real events. He co-founded The Village Voice in 1955 with Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher, creating a platform for alternative journalism and downtown culture. His account of the 1967 Pentagon protest, The Armies of the Night, portrayed the antiwar movement through first-person candor and theatrical self-scrutiny; it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He followed with Miami and the Siege of Chicago, a vivid chronicle of the 1968 political conventions that placed him amid protesters, party bosses, and television cameras. Mailer also ran for mayor of New York City in 1969 with columnist Jimmy Breslin as his running mate, a quixotic campaign that proposed making the city the 51st state and further cemented his image as a public intellectual who embraced risk.

Controversy, Debate, and Public Feuds
No less than his books, Mailer's arguments animated American letters. He debated feminists and critics, drawing fierce rebuttals from figures such as Kate Millett while publishing The Prisoner of Sex as his counterstatement. His longstanding feud with Gore Vidal produced unforgettable televised exchanges, notably on The Dick Cavett Show, where Vidal's cool riposte and Mailer's provocations became part of media lore. He maintained friendships and rivalries with contemporaries including Truman Capote and William Styron, and he moved in the orbit of literary editors and patrons such as George Plimpton, who helped shape the conversation around New Journalism and modern reportage.

Film, Theater, and Other Ventures
Mailers restlessness led him behind the camera and onto the stage. He directed experimental films including Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone, the last remembered for a violent, unscripted on-camera altercation with actor Rip Torn that underscored Mailer's appetite for confrontation and improvisation. He adapted and later directed Tough Guys Dont Dance, extending his interest in noir and moral extremity into cinema. In theater and public readings, he cultivated a persona that treated artistic creation as a form of combat and spectacle.

Nonfiction Landmarks
Mailers most sustained achievements in nonfiction redefined long-form reporting. Of a Fire on the Moon captured the Apollo program with cosmic speculation and on-the-ground detail. The Fight rendered Muhammad Ali's clash with George Foreman as both sport and epic, chronicling the fighters and the entourage around them with granular, novelistic care. The Executioners Song, his massive account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore, melded documentary tape, interviews, and spare narration into a new kind of American saga and earned him a second Pulitzer Prize. In biography and history, he pushed into contested territory with Marilyn: A Biography, a book entangled with the legend and image of Marilyn Monroe, and later with Oswalds Tale, a study of Lee Harvey Oswald. Producer and journalist Lawrence Schiller was a vital collaborator and conduit for reporting on projects linked to both Monroe and Gilmore, a partnership that grounded Mailers narrative ambition in extensive fieldwork.

Late Novels and Ambitions
Even as journalism brought him acclaim, Mailer pursued capacious, risk-taking fiction. Ancient Evenings immersed readers in ancient Egypt with visionary intensity; Harlots Ghost offered a vast examination of the CIA and Cold War duplicities; The Gospel According to the Son retold the life of Jesus in a controlled, lucid voice that surprised many readers who associated him with tumult. Late in life he returned to origins and evil with The Castle in the Forest, a novel about the young Adolf Hitler narrated by a demonic intelligence, a final testament to his fascination with power, myth, and the dark undercurrents of history.

Personal Life and Relationships
Mailers personal life was as complex as his bibliography. He married six times and had a large family, a fact that shaped his daily routines and his need for steady output. His marriage to painter and actress Adele Morales became tragically infamous after a violent incident in 1960 that left her seriously injured; she later wrote her own account, bringing renewed scrutiny to Mailers behavior and the culture that enabled it. Subsequent marriages, including to actress Beverly Bentley and later to writer and model Norris Church Mailer, brought collaborators into his household. With Norris, he built a late-life partnership that balanced his disciplinary rigor with her own artistry and memoir writing. Friends and colleagues such as Robert Lowell appear as living presences in his pages, while editors, agents, and publishers helped him manage a workload that encompassed novels, essays, columns, interviews, and public appearances.

Institutions, Honors, and Service
Mailer served as president of PEN American Center, advocating for writers and free expression while engaging in debates about the responsibilities of the artist in public life. Across his career he received some of the nations highest literary honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award. He contributed to and was profiled by leading magazines, notably Esquire, where editor Harold Hayes encouraged ambitious literary journalism that blurred genre boundaries.

Final Years and Death
By the 2000s, Mailer was an elder statesman of American letters whose interviews and essays surveyed the century he had helped chronicle. He continued to publish, to lecture, and to appear at literary festivals, maintaining a vigorous schedule well into his eighties. He died in 2007, leaving behind a vast archive of manuscripts, correspondence, and recordings that scholars have continued to mine for insight into his process and his times.

Legacy
Norman Mailer stands as a singular figure: a novelist of war and identity, a reporter who expanded the possibilities of nonfiction, a filmmaker who treated art as a live experiment, and a public intellectual who insisted that writing mattered in the arena of politics and culture. The people who intersected with his life and work form a map of postwar America: rivals like Gore Vidal, allies like Jimmy Breslin, collaborators like Lawrence Schiller, presences like Robert Lowell, boxers like Muhammad Ali, actors like Rip Torn, and the many editors, spouses, and children who navigated his relentless, questing energy. His books continue to invite argument and admiration, not least because he refused to separate the novelist from the citizen, and because he believed the American story demanded both forms.

Our collection contains 38 quotes who is written by Norman, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Meaning of Life.

Other people realated to Norman: William F. Buckley, Jr. (Journalist), Germaine Greer (Activist), Philip Roth (Novelist), Jack Henry Abbott (Criminal), Gay Talese (Journalist), Matthew Barney (Artist), Cliff Fadiman (Author)