Norman Mailer Dead at 84
News of the loss of one of America’s most unique voices, Norman Mailer, rippled through the literary community Saturday after Mailer’s biographer announced that the author of “The Armies of the Night” and “The Naked and the Dead” had expired at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital.
AP via Breitbart.com:
Mailer had views on almost everything.
The 1970s: “The decade in which image became pre-eminent 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.”
“He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive. He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an opinion on, and everything he had was so original,” said friend William Kennedy, author of “Ironweed.”
Click here to read John Nichols’ article about Mailer’s clash with President Bush in The Nation.