Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Dies at 84 – New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/books/11mailer.html?pagewanted=all

Another missed obit, this time for larger-than-life writer, Norman Mailer. I’ve read and re-read The Executioner’s Song, and have seen him in a fascinating interview with a French documentarian. For these, I’m willing to excuse his brashness, his anti-woman 60s pronouncements, and the fact that I haven’t read any of his other works. But they’re definitely on the to-do list. I’ll steal this quote from Gore Vidal to sum up my feelings:

“Mailer is forever shouting at us that he is about to tell us something we must know or has just told us something revelatory and we failed to hear him or that he will, God grant his poor abused brain and body just one more chance, get through to us so that we will know. Each time he speaks he must become more bold, more loud, put on brighter motley and shake more foolish bells. Yet of all my contemporaries I retain the greatest affection for Norman as a force and as an artist. He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.”

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