Mailer was one of the most celebrated novelists of his time with books like The Naked and the Dead. He also wrote some noted nonfiction such as The Executioner's Song, about murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer won the Pulitzer twice, so he had to be good. He was talented, but he often wasted his talent to write books merely to pay alimony or child support; for example, he wrote The Prisoner of Sex, his answer to feminist Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Millett, as some may recall, had a section in her book about Mailer's novels, and Mailer, either thin-skinned or needing the money, decided to write a book in response. Another example of Mailer's silliness was his "biography" on Marilyn Monroe, which was criticized for not being terribly original and lifting ideas, if not plagiarizing, from other books. He was fairly witty in interviews, however, so it was a wash.
Whatever else he was, he was certainly colorful:
At different points in his life Mr. Mailer was a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent of women’s liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing. Boxing obsessed him and inspired some of his best writing. Any time he met a critic or a reviewer, even a friendly one, he would put up his fists and drop into a crouch.
He also treated his wives with respect:
In November 1960, Mr. Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife, seriously wounding her. The incident happened at the end of an all-night party announcing Mr. Mailer’s intention to run in the 1961 mayoral campaign, and he, like many of his guests, had been drinking heavily. Mr. Mailer was arrested, but his wife declined to press charges, and he was eventually released after being sent to Bellevue Hospital for observation. The marriage broke up two years later.
Mailer was married six times in all. We who lived through the feminist wars of the early 1970s remember this:
In the 1970s Mr. Mailer entered into a long feud with feminists and proponents of women’s liberation, and in a famous 1971 debate with Germaine Greer at Town Hall in Manhattan he declared himself an “enemy of birth control.” He meant it. By his various wives, Mr. Mailer had nine children, all of whom survive him: Susan, , by Ms. Silverman; Danielle and Elizabeth Anne, by Ms. Morales; Kate, by Lady Campbell; Michael Burks and Stephen McLeod, by Ms. Bentley; Maggie Alexandra, by Ms. Stevens; and John Buffalo, by Ms. Church. Also surviving are an adopted son, Matthew, by an earlier marriage of Ms. Norris’s, and 10 grandchildren.
Mailer worked right to the end of his life.
Charles McGrath wrote this outstanding obituary for the NYT.
Michiko Kakutani also weighs in on the late writer.
