Norman Mailer has died at age 84 of renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC according to Michael Lennon, the author's literary executor.
Norman Mailer:Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize
New York State Author 1991-1993
National Book Award, Distinguished Lifetime Literary Contributions 2007
Perennial Candidate,
Nobel Prize for Literature
Born: January 21, 1923
Mailer on :
The '70s: "the decade in which image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on."
Poetry: A "natural activity ... a poem comes to one," whereas prose required making "an appointment with one's mind to write a few thousand words."
Journalism: irresponsible. "You can't be too certain about what happened."
Technology: "insidious, debilitating and depressing," and nobody in politics had an answer to "its impact on our spiritual well-being."
Mailer's suspicion of technology was so deep that while most writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, some 1,500 words a day, in what Newsweek's Sokolov called "an illegible and curving hand." When a stranger asked him on a Brooklyn street if he wrote on a computer, he replied, "No, I never learned that," then added, in a mischevious aside, "but my girl does."
In a 1971 magazine piece about the new women's liberation movement, Mailer equated the dehumanizing effect of technology with what he said was feminists' need to abolish the mystery, romance and "blind, goat-kicking lust" from sex.