Norman Mailer: 1923-2007

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey on January 31, 1923, but he was raised in Brooklyn, New York.

Mailer's first literary effort was a 250-page story, called 'Invasion From Mars', which he wrote at the age of nine in notebooks.

In 1939 he graduated from Boys High School and then studied at Harvard University.

During World War II Mailer was a sergeant in the United States Army. He wanted to go to Europe and be in the first wave of invasion troops, and was disappointed when he was sent to the South Pacific. In 1946 he was discharged, and the next year he enrolled at the Sorbonne. The Naked and Dead was written in fifteen months. It was published when Mailer was just 25, and made him world famous.

Subsequent novels did not receive similar respect.

In the mid-1950s Mailer started to gain fame as an anti-establishment essayist. His outspoken style led him in the 1970s into collision course with the feminist movement.

Mailer supported the Persian Gulf War for patriotic reasons in 1991, feeling that the United States was in a bad state and needed a war.

Mailer died on November 10, 2007, in Manhattan.