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Author Mailer dies at 84

10/11/2007

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer has died as a result of renal failure aged 84, his literary executor has confirmed.

Mailer was awarded the esteemed Pulitzer Prize on two occasions, for his 1968 novel The Armies of the Night and for The Executioner's Song in 1979.

A co-founder of New York's lauded alternative newspaper, the Village Voice, he was renowned for his strident political views and forthright opinions on the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

Born in 1923 in New Jersey, Mailer was married six times and fathered nine children, once telling an NBC interviewer he was worried "women are going to take over the world".

The author had surgery to remove scar tissue around his lung last month and died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said his executor J Michael Lennon, who was also Mailer's biographer.

Mailer rose to fame with his novel The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948 while he was serving in Paris as a post-graduate student as part of the GI Bill.

The book was a fictionalised account based on his experiences in the Army in the second world war, and Mailer mused in 2005: "A man who went to a famous prep school in the early 1920s said afterward, 'It was the worst experience of my life and the most valuable.' I can say the same about my time in the US Army."