Norman Kingsley Mailer (born 1923), American author, film producer and director, wrote one of the most noteworthy American novels about World War II. Only in his later political journalism did he reach that level of achievement again. Norman Mailer was...

[This entry was updated by J. Michael Lennon (Wilkes University) from his update in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, pp. 162-183, of the entries by Philip H. Bufithis (Shepherd College) in DLB 2: American Novelists Since...

Norman Mailer's achievement lies primarily in his treatment of the conflict between man's search for self-actualization and the strictures society places upon him. Mailer has rendered this theme with an energy of style, an ideational power, and a vivid...

With the publication of his brilliant first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), Norman Mailer established himself as the next important writer of his age; and indeed, over the next five decades, he has fulfilled that promise many times over....

Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and film director. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative...

It was a great paradox of Norman Mailer's life that the great macho man of American letters lived in a town famous for its drag queens, writes Philip Hoare [further to the obituary by Andrew Rosenheim, 12 November ]. Since the mid-1960s, Mailer had...

The Lives of Norman Mailer. Carl Rollyson. Paragon House, $26.95. The temptation for most is to think of Norman Mailer as a sort of heroic flop: the last autodidact, if you will, the novelist as philosopher king--supreme arbiter and embodiment of the history,...

Quotes about Norman Mailer, who died Saturday at age 84:"He was really the great chronicler of his time, the champion of personal reportage. His output was prodigious, his range of interests very wide, from Marilyn Monroe to Picasso to the art of graffiti to extreme...

Norman Mailer was a literary pugilist, attacking his subjects and opponents as writer, debater and cultural provocateur.A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, fighter, feuder, journalist and poet, Mailer was a key figure as postwar America passed through the era of civil rights, Vietnam and women's liberation.On Thursday,...

In the following essay, Toback provides a survey of Mailer's writings and personal politics upon the publication of Why Are We in Vietnam?

In the following essay, Merrill offers critical examination of Mailer's nonfiction essays, including "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," "The White Negro," and "Ten Thousand Words a Minute."

In the following review, Kermode offers a favorable assessment of The Gospel According to the Son, which he concludes is "a book of considerable intellectual force."