Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate. His best work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1980, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mailer's book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award.
Along with the likes of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism.
In 1955, Mailer and three others founded The Village Voice, an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village.
Read more about Norman Mailer: Early Life, Political Activism, Biographical Subjects, Death and Legacy, Cultural References
Famous quotes by norman mailer:
“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“So we think of Marilyn who was every man’s love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today.... We’re all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Again, he felt a crude ecstasy. He could not have given the reason, but the mountain tormented him, beckoned him, held an answer to something he wanted. It was so pure, so austere.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitions ... he has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover’s sense of the moment of crisis, and he knew ... how costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)