Norman Mailer (1923-2007), American novelist and essayist, author of The Naked and the Dead, considered one of the finest novels to come out of World War II (1939-1945). A bold and colorful critic of modern American society, Mailer was a spokesperson for nonconformity in the 1950s and for political protest in the 1960s. His ideal hero, epitomized in his essay “The White Negro,” is the existential hipster, the man who willfully estranges himself from a society he cannot believe in.

Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on January 31, 1923, Mailer graduated from Harvard University in 1943 and later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. His service as an infantryman in the United States Army during World War II provided background material for his naturalistic novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), published when he was 25. An active literary figure, Mailer served as an editor of the magazine Dissent from 1953 to 1963 and as a columnist for the New York newspaper, The Village Voice, which he cofounded in 1955. In 1969 he ran an imaginative but unsuccessful campaign for mayor of New York City.

The Naked and the Dead, by intensive concentration on a small platoon, presents a naturalistic microcosm of men at war. The conflict between the strict, mean-spirited General Cummings and Lieutenant Hearn, Mailer’s troubled hero, expresses the theme of all his works—the opposition between authoritarianism and individual freedom. The setting of The Deer Park (1955) is a resort habituated by Hollywood magnates involved in an endless struggle for power. In An American Dream (1965) Mailer evokes what he believes to be the deepest urgings of American fantasy life: violence, power, wealth, and sex. Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) is a nonpolitical novel narrated by a disc jockey.

During the 1960s Mailer developed a vivid journalistic style with the intention of presenting actual events with all the drama and complexity found in fiction. His 1968 book The Armies of the Night was the culmination of these efforts. The work was an account of Mailer’s experiences at the 1967 anti-Vietnam War march in Washington, D.C., during which he was jailed and fined. It won both the National Book Award for arts and letters and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Mailer’s other works of this era include Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), about the Republican and Democratic national conventions of 1968, and Of a Fire on the Moon (1971), which presented Mailer’s view of the 1969 moon landing. Marilyn (1963), a biography of actress Marilyn Monroe, proved controversial because of its many unproven speculations. Mailer returned to the theme of violence in The Executioner’s Song (1979), a factually based reconstruction of the life and execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore. The book was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

Mailer’s other books include Ancient Evenings (1983), which uses the framework of ancient Egypt to explore such themes as sex, death, and the powers of the mind; Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), a detective story that was made into a motion picture in 1987; Harlot’s Ghost (1991), a lengthy novel about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); Oswald’s Tale (1995), about Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of United States president John F. Kennedy; and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: an Interpretative Biography (1995). Mailer’s fictional novel The Gospel According to the Son (1997) sets out to retell the life of Jesus Christ from the first person perspective of Jesus himself. The Castle in the Forest (2007), his first novel in ten years, imagines the youth of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Mailer’s shorter writings are collected in Advertisements for Myself (1959), The Presidential Papers (1963), and Cannibals and Christians (1966). He also wrote, directed, and appeared in a number of motion pictures. Mailer’s last work, On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007), was published only a month before his death. In this series of dialogues with his literary executor, Mailer offered his thoughts on God and religion.