Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1923). Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948), considered one of the best novels about World War II, and helped foundThe Village Voice, an independent weekly newspaper in New York City. He is the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. Mailer was considered very bright as a young boy, and he had so much energy that it was necessary to keep him occupied at all times. According to a story, one summer Mailer's mother handed her son a pad and paper and said, "Here, write something." He wrote his first story at 10 years old. It was called "The Martian Invasion" and reached 35,000 words in length.
Mailer entered Harvard University when he was just sixteen, where he studied aeronautical engineering. He also wrote a short story called "The Greatest Thing in the World," which won Story magazine's undergraduate prize, and he also wrote a lot of fiction in the style of Ernest Hemingway.
Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943 and found himself in the Army, fighting in World War II, less than a year later. He served as a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippine mountains and, while there, got the idea for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. He wrote that novel after he was discharged, and it made him famous.
Norman Mailer said, "The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people."
Mailer was also interested in journalism, and in 1954 he helped foundThe Village Voice, and wrote a weekly column for a short time. Mailer was also one of the first to write in the style of "new journalism," which mixes autobiography with journalism. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his "new journalism" book The Armies of the Night (1968), a personalized account of the 1967 march on Washington, D.C., which Mailer participated in and was arrested for. Mailer has also written "interpretive biographies" of such people as Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Pablo Picasso.
And he said, "Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
*A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
*Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
*America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
*Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
*Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
*Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
*Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
*God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.
*Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
*Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
*I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
*I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
*I hate everything which is not in myself.
*If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
*In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
*It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.
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