| ||
[ZT] With writers like Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe and John Updike, Norman Mailer was part of an exclusive club of novelists and essayists who challenged, tantalised and often outraged readers with their reflections on American life, history and morality. He was born in 1923 in New Jersey into a close-knit Jewish family which eventually moved to Brooklyn. In 1971, he head-butted his fellow writer Gore Vidal before a television chat-show after Vidal had written that "there has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression". Politically, Norman Mailer described himself as a "left conservative". He mixed radical politics - damned capitalism, supported the black power movement - while simultaneously baiting feminists, in works like The Prisoner of Sex, and seemingly deepening his love affair with all things violent. Mailer also aspired to political office. In 1969, he ran for the mayoralty of New York City, but sank his own campaign by telling his aides that they were "nothing but a bunch of spoiled pigs". Mailer's strength as a mythologiser reached its height in three works. These were his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, The Executioner's Song (1979) - a fictionalised account of the execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore - and Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (1995), an examination of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. | ||
