Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer was an American author, journalist, and filmmaker who was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn. His time as an Army reconnaissance rifleman in the Philippines during World War II shaped The Naked and the Dead, the 1948 novel that made his reputation. He wrote twelve novels over nearly six decades, among them An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam? His nonfiction novel The Armies of the Night earned both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, while The Executioner's Song won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Mailer co-founded The Village Voice and was considered an innovator of New Journalism. He directed the improvisational films Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone (1970), played Stanford White in Ragtime (1981), and wrote a screenplay for a TV version of The Executioner's Song that received an Emmy nomination.