A rabble-rouser to the end, Mailer was founder of the Village Voice and a pioneer in New Journalism who embodied all the excesses and extremes of society.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer was unabashedly original, socially outrageous and a staunch defender of the powerless.This month marks the 100th birthday of the enfant terrible of American letters, Norman Mailer, who died of acute renal failure in 2007.
A few years after Pearl Harbor, Mailer graduated from Harvard and joined the military. Before his departure to Fort Bragg, N.C., he hurriedly married Beatrice Silverman, and exchanged long letters and field notes, drawing from his Army experiences with the 112th Cavalry Regiment, out of Fort Bliss. He plotted his “big ideas” in the novel “The Naked and the Dead,” re-released this month by Library of America.
Mailer explored how traumatic episodes affected soldiers in the fog of battle. There are no heroes or villains because they all are products of history, circumstance, power relations and human foibles. The 112th Cavalry Regiment suffered 192 casualties during the Luzon campaign. Mailer earned a Combat Infantry Badge and was promoted to sergeant.
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