Author Norman Mailer dead at 84

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer

Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer first published The Village Voice, as an arts-oriented free weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.

Mailer was born to a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. His father, Isaac Barnett, was a South Africa-born accountant, and his mother, Fanny Schneider, ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. He was brought up in Brooklyn, New York, was graduated from Boys' High School and when he was only sixteen was admitted to Harvard University in 1939, where he studied aeronautical engineering. At the university, he became interested in writing and published his first story when he was 18.

Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943 was drafted into the Army in World War II and served in the Philippines.

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