Norman Mailer

Born in New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, Norman Mailer burst onto the literary scene with The Naked and the Dead, considered one of the best war novels ever written. Based on his brief army experience in the Philippines, the novel won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize and propelled Mailer to a level of fame at which he brashly remained for the next sixty years. Painstaking and exact in his writing, most of Mailer’s books took years to write. His powerful evocation of executed murderer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song garnered him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1980. Prolific in all aspects, including political activism, he left behind forty-five thousand letters when he died.