Lirerary Paper on Norman Mailer

Among all the major American literature writers, Norman Mailer is perhaps one of the most well-known both in the United States and internationally. No career in American literature has been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, public, and misunderstood. Few American writers have had their careers on the verge of public inspection for such a lengthy period; none has been so regularly celebrated. In Norman Mailer’s novel, “The Naked and the Dead”, the author uses inspirational fiction and non-fiction to bring out the emotional aspects of people after a war has ended.
            Norman Kingsley Mailer was born on January 31, 1923 and died November 10, 2007. He was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and film director. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts and politics weekly newspaper 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 well-known Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was a South African-born accountant, and his mother, Fanny Schneider, ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. Mailer's sister, Barbara, was born in 1927. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from Boys High School and entered Harvard University in 1939, where he studied aeronautical engineering. At Harvard, he became interested in writing and published his first story at the age of 18, winning Story Magazine's college contest in 1941. As an undergraduate, he was a member of The Signet Society. After graduating in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. In...