born Jan. 31, 1923, Long Branch, N.J., U.S.
U.S. novelist.
He studied at Harvard University. He drew on his wartime service in the Pacific for his celebrated novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), which established him as one of the major American writers of the postwar decades. A flamboyant and controversial figure who often enjoyed antagonizing critics and readers, he has since commanded less respect for his fiction
which also includes the novels An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967)
than for journalistic works that convey actual events with the richness of novels, including The Armies of the Night (1968, Pulitzer Prize); Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968); Of a Fire on the Moon (1970); and The Executioner's Song (1979, Pulitzer Prize), about the execution of a murderer. Mailer was a favourite target of feminists in the 1960s and '70s.
Mailer, 1968
Newsweek photo by Bernard Gotfryd, Copyright Newsweek, 1968