NORMAN Mailer, the New York literary titan whose work – including the acclaimed book “The Naked and the Dead” – influenced a generation of writers died yesterday. He was 84.
Mailer was a larger-than-life figure who once ran for mayor, and wrote with a streetwise passion that he brought to endeavors in politics, journalism and a half-dozen marriages.
He died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, the author’s biographer and literary executor.
From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as “The Armies of the Night,” the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, energy and originality.
“He was like a generator,” fellow iconic novelist Tom Wolfe told The Post. “Everybody in this particular line of work will miss him.
“He took the business of being a novelist very seriously.”
Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious and high-living. He drank, fought, campaigned to get a killer freed, smoked pot and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.
He had nine children, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry and crusaded against women’s lib.
“Obviously he was a great American voice,” said writer Joan Didion, struggling for words upon learning of Mailer’s death.
“He was all by himself,” she told The Post. “Right now, I just can’t find the words.”
Mailer was born on Jan. 31, 1923 in Long Branch, N.J. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn – later described by Mailer as “the most secure Jewish environment in America.”
Mailer completed public schools, earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard, where he decided to become a writer, and was drafted into the Army.
His experiences as an infantryman in the Philippines provided a basis for “The Naked and the Dead,” published in 1948 while he was a post-graduate student in Paris.
The book – noteworthy for Mailer’s invention of the word “fug” as a substitute for the then-unacceptable four-letter original – was a best-seller, and Mailer returned home to find himself anointed the new Hemingway.
Mailer embraced the early 1950s counterculture – defining “hip” in his essay “The White Negro,” allying himself with Beat Generation gurus Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and writing social and political commentary for the leftist Village Voice, which he helped found.
Mailer turned reporter to cover the 1960 Democratic convention for Esquire and later claimed, with typical hubris, that his piece, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” had made the difference in John F. Kennedy’s razor-thin margin of victory over Republican Richard Nixon.
While Life magazine called his next book, “An American Dream” (1965), “the big comeback of Norman Mailer,” the author-journalist was chronicling major events of the day: an anti-war march on Washington, the 1968 political conventions, the Apollo moon shot.
His account of Muhammad Ali’s “Rumble in the Jungle” fight against George Foreman in 1974 was hailed for its colorful insight. This is how Mailer described Foreman’s fall to the canvas after Ali delivered his knockout blow: “He went over like a 6-foot 60-year-old butler who has just heard tragic news.”
His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, “The Armies of the Night,” won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was described as the only person over 40 trusted by the hippie generation.
Mailer’s personal life was as turbulent as the times. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife. She declined to press charges.
“He could charm the hell out of you,” the Morales, 82, told The Post in a recent interview. “And he still had a sense of humor then. Later, he turned into a monster.”
In 1969 Mailer made a half-satirical run for New York City mayor, with the slogan “Vote the Rascals In.” He said New York City should become the 51st state, and urged a referendum for “black ghetto dwellers” on whether they should set up their own government.
He was fiery and quick with a quip. Journalist Jimmy Breslin, who ran for City Council president alongside Mailer, yesterday told The Post about one incident while he was making his mayoral run.
“He was talking at Brooklyn College,” Breslin said. “He talked about serious things, about how it’s good for the mind for white kids and black kids to be in school together.
“And a kid gets up in the audience and says, ‘Last year in Queens we had a lot of snow and they didn’t clean it up. What would you do in a big snowfall?’ ”
” ‘Sir, I’d piss on it,’ he said. That was good.”
Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the Pentagon protests. While directing the film “Maidstone” in 1968, the self-described “old club fighter” punched actor Lane Smith, breaking his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn’s ear in another scuffle.
His 1979 book “The Executioner’s Song,” an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, whom Mailer never met, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His prison research led him to champion the work of a convict-writer named Jack Abbott – and was subjected to ridicule and criticism in 1981 when Abbott, released to a halfway house, promptly stabbed a man to death.
Mailer’s suspicion of technology was so deep that while most writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, some 1,500 words a day. In a 1971 magazine piece, Mailer equated the dehumanizing effect of technology with what he said was feminists’ need to abolish “blind, goat-kicking lust” from sex.
Besides Morales, Mailer’s other wives were Beatrice Silverman, Lady Jeanne Campbell, Beverly Bentley, actress Carol Stevens and painter Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.
Despite heart surgery, hearing loss and arthritic knees that forced him to walk with canes, Mailer retained his enthusiasm for writing. Early this year, he released “The Castle in the Forest,” a novel about Hitler’s early years, narrated by an underling of Satan. A book of conversations about the cosmos, “On God: An Uncommon Conversation,” came out in the fall.
In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the “withering” of general interest in the “serious novel.”
“Norman Mailer conceived a literature as a hero’s quest for a Holy Grail,” said former Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham. ” By force of words, he sometimes found it.”