Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer Date of birth: January 31, 1923

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York in what he calls a "typical middle class Jewish family." His father was an accountant, his mother assisted an uncle in running a small trucking company. As a boy, he reveled in romantic adventure Fiction, and at the age of nine composed a 250-page science Fiction story called "Invasion From Mars." An ambitious and competitive student, he graduated from Brooklyn's Boys High School in 1939 and won admission to Harvard at age 16. While still an undergraduate, he won a student Fiction contest sponsored by Story magazine, and though he majored a degree in aeronautical engineering, he had already resolved to make a career as a professional writer.

He graduated in the middle of World War II, and entered the United States Army, serving as a sergeant in the Pacific. After the war, he undertook graduate studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in only 15 months composed his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), inspired by his wartime experiences in the Philippines. The book enjoyed enormous success in the United States, and made Mailer a national celebrity at age 25.

The young novelist spent a year in Hollywood, but soon became disenchanted with the motion picture industry, and increasingly fascinated with radical politics. He returned to New York and settled in Greenwich Village. Mailer's next two novels reflected the political tensions of the McCarthy Era. Barbary Shore (1951), set in his native Brooklyn, and The Deer Park (1955), a tale of Hollywood, both met hostile reviews and disappointing sales. In the late 1950s, Mailer appeared in print. most frequently as the author of startling magazine essays on the heated topics of sex, drugs, race and violence. A 1957 essay, "The White Negro," drew parallels between America's racial tensions and the alienation of the era's Beat Generation.

Some of Mailer's most provocative writing of the late 1950s appeared in the controversial volume Advertisements for Myself (1959). In the same period, Mailer co-founded The Village Voice newspaper, the first of America's alternative weeklies. As Mailer's subject matter became more incendiary, his private life became increasingly turbulent. His fascination with drinking, drugs and violence nearly took a tragic turn in 1960, when he stabbed his wife Adele Morales with a penknife after a nightlong party. Mrs. Mailer declined to press charges and Mailer was given a suspended sentence. The couple were quickly reconciled but later divorced.

In the 1960s, Mailer found a renewed sense of purpose in reporting on the social upheaval associated with the civil rights and anti-war movements, the rising counterculture and the sexual revolution. Beginning in 1960, he covered the Democratic and Republican conventions as a journalist. He reported on the Kennedy administration in Presidential Papers (1963) and fused themes of politics, sex and violence in his novel An American Dream (1965). With Cannibals and Christians (1966), he consolidated his reputation as a major American essayist and social commentator.

Throughout the 1960s he turned to innovative new forms of journalism to report on the tumultuous politics of the time, employing many techniques of Fiction, including colorful prose and a strong personal point of view, to comment on current events.