Norman Mailer took the literary world by storm in the 1960s.
He was one of the new breed of journalists Tom Wolfe celebrated in his 1973 collection of essays “The New Journalism” – and Mailer’s work helped make Esquire one of the hottest magazines of the 1960s.
In 1959, Mailer wrote his first piece for Esquire, “The Mind of the Outlaw,” beginning a long and productive relationship with the magazine, according to biographer Mary Dearborn.
Through the magazine work, she recounts, he tested out a wide variety of literary approaches, honed his journalism skills, and experimented with writing a serial novel.
“Perhaps most important,” she wrote, “he was given a public stage for his most immediate responses to events around him.”
According to Esquire historian Hugh Merrill, “Mailer was to Esquire . . . what Hemingway was in the 1930s – the hairy literary chest,” Dearborn wrote.
Mourning Mailer yesterday, Wolfe commented that “literary people are going to miss how fast he made the current go. The ship was never still.
“Some of his best pieces were about the literary world,” Wolfe said.
But Mailer himself most wanted to be remembered as a novelist.
“I think the novel’s a higher form, that’s all,” he told an interviewer last January. “An earl does not want to be called a count. A marquis does not want to be called a baron. It’s much tougher to write a novel.
“I think the irony may be that I’ve had much more influence as a journalist than as a novelist.”