MAILER, NORMAN

born Jan. 31, 1923, Long Branch, N.J., U.S. American novelist who successfully developed a form of journalism that conveys actual events with the subjective richness and imaginative complexity of the novel. Both his fiction and nonfiction made a radical critique of the totalitarianism he believed inherent in the centralized power structure of 20th-century America. Mailer grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Harvard University in 1943 with a degree in aeronautical engineering. Drafted into the army in 1944, he served in the Pacific until 1946. While he was enrolled at the Sorbonne, in Paris, he wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948), hailed immediately as one of the finest American novels to come out of World War II. Mailer's success at 25 aroused the expectation that he would develop from a war novelist into the leading literary figure of the postwar generation. But Mailer's search for themes and forms to give meaningful expression to what he saw as the problems of his time committed him to exploratory works that had little general appeal. His second novel, Barbary Shore (1951), and The Deer Park (1955) were greeted with critical hostility and mixed reviews, respectively. His next important work was a long essay, The White Negro (1957), a sympathetic study of a marginal social typethe hipster. In 1959, when Mailer was generally dismissed as a one-book author, he made a bid for attention with the book Advertisements for Myself, a collection of unfinished stories, parts of novels, essays, reviews, notebook entries, or ideas for fiction. The miscellany's naked self-revelation won the admiration of a younger generation seeking alternative styles of life and art. Mailer's subsequent novels, though not critical successes, were widely read as guides to life. An American Dream (1965) is about a man who murders his wife, and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) is about a young man on an Alaskan hunting trip. A controversial figure whose egotism and belligerence often antagonized both critics and readers, Mailer did not command the same respect for his fiction that he received for his journalism; The Armies of the Night (1968), for example, was based on the Washington peace demonstrations of October 1967, during which Mailer was jailed and fined for an act of civil disobedience. A similar treatment was given the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions in Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) and the moon exploration in Of a Fire on the Moon (1970). In 1969 Mailer ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City. Among his other works are his essay collections The Presidential Papers (1963) and Cannibals and Christians (1966); The Executioner's Song (1979), a novel based on the life of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore; Ancient Evenings (1983), the first volume of a projected trilogy about Egypt; Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984), a contemporary mystery thriller; and the enormous Harlot's Ghost (1991).