Norman Mailer was one of the most ambitious, combative, and celebrated American writers of his era, a novelist and journalist who threw himself into the great public dramas of his time and helped invent a new kind of personal, literary nonfiction. Born in New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, he was educated at Harvard before serving in the Pacific during the Second World War.
That war produced his first and most conventional triumph: The Naked and the Dead (1948), a sprawling combat novel published when he was just twenty-five, which made him famous overnight. Restless and unwilling to repeat himself, he spent the following decades testing styles and provoking controversy, his enormous talent matched by an enormous ego.
Mailer became a central figure in the "New Journalism," applying the techniques of the novel to real events and inserting himself into the story. The Armies of the Night (1968), his account of an anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon, won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Executioner's Song (1979), about the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, won him a second.
A famously turbulent public man — co-founder of The Village Voice, perennial provocateur, six-times married, once an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of New York — Mailer remained productive into old age, writing fiction, essays, and biographies. He died in 2007, having left a vast and contentious body of work.