And I didn’t know until now but, Norman Mailer died.
Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old “enfant terrible.” Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, street-wise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.
(via aol news)
Another author that I failed to get around to reading while he was alive.
The word “fug” is thrown around quite a bit on the Internet. But did you know that it was Norman Mailer who coined the word in 1948 in his first book, The Naked and the Dead?
(via writer’s blog)
No, I did not know that Writer’s Blog. I did not know.
On the other hand, he said, writing was now easier for him in at least one respect. “The waste is less,†he said. “The elements of mania and depression are diminished. Writing is a serious and sober activity for me now compared to when I was younger. The question of how good are you is one that really good novelists obsess about more than poor ones. Good novelists are always terribly affected by the fear that they’re not as good as they thought and why are they doing it, what are they up to?”
After reading The New York Times obituary of Mailer, I’ve come to decide that Norman Mailer was quite mad and possibly an impossible man to know. But it’s the mad ones that have all the unique and, at times, forward thinking ideas.
