Norman Mailer, 1923-2007

[lagilman]

Whatever you thought of the man himself, the work will be remembered.

Remove your hat. Raise your drink. Read a book.

Comments

[eeknight.livejournal.com]

I thought this quote from the AP was telling:

In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the "withering" of general interest in the "serious novel."

Authors like himself, he said more than once, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism.

When he was young, Mailer said, "fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway ... I don't think the same thing can be said anymore. I don't think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me."

Kept his fighting spurs on right to the end, didn't he?

[neutronjockey.livejournal.com]

*raises a glass*
Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.

He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's lib.

But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, "in the end it is the writing that will count."

I guess you could say Mailer lived a little...

[allaboutm-e.livejournal.com]

or watch his "Gilmore Girls" episode...

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

I thought it notable then, and still now, when some years back my aunt pointed out Mailer's house in Provincetown, which was on the main street (in that area, there's the street, the buildings on either side of the street, and behind the buildings it's all beachfront and ocean--it's also extremely expensive property there!). Provincetown is arguable the pinkest locality in the USA--destination for summer vacation of financially well-off homosexuals and full-time residence area of a lot of homosexuals, with a very high proportion of the population being same-gender oriented. It didn't bother Mailer to have a residence completely ungated and on the public road in the midst of pink locality USA, and didn't bother the homosexual community to have Mailer around (as opposed to invasion of P'town by the Westboro Baptist Church fanatical homophobes on a day of a rainstorm so bad even Cape Codders stayed hunkered down inside... and given that Cape Codders have such habits as deliberately going outside and driving to specific oceanside areas of Cape Cod during HURRICANES to sightsee just how vicious the wind and rain and tide are, that says a lot about how completely appalling the weather was that day!).