NORMAN MAILER, HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMP of POST-WAR AMERICAN LETTERS, DEAD at 84

Norman Kingsley Mailer, the self-crowned "heavyweight champ" of American letters, died of renal failure at Sinai Hospital on November 10, 2007. He was 84 years old. Mailer, according to his New York Times obituary, towered above all other American writers of his and subsequent generations

A primal life force whose writing elucidated the human condition among America and Americans better than any of his contemporaries for better than three decades, Mailer likely will rank with Melville and Hemingway as among the greatest writers produced by the United States. Although denied the Nobel Prize that he had long coveted (in the Bicentennial Year sweep of the Nobel Prizes by Americans, Mailer's contemporary Saul Bellow claimed the Prize that likely would have been Mailer's had he not been so unconventional and controversial), Mailer will be the writer that future generations go to to understand the America of the late 1940s through at least the early '80s. Even as late as the 2001 "9/11" attacks on America, Mailer's voice continued to be clear and strong -- and contrary -- as he denounced the jingoistic, militaristic reaction to what was essentially a terrorist act, not a declaration of war by the Muslim world on America. Advertisements for Myself, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, and The Executioners Song -- one novel and three books of "journalism" -- will be mandatory on the reading lists of universities 100 years in the future.

War, as Mailer knew it, was declared by the United States on the Empire of Japan on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Germany entered the war two days later by declaring war on the U.S. to honor its pact with its Axis ally.) Mailer, who at 16 entered Harvard College to study engineering and took his degree in 1943, was drafted into the Army the following year and served briefly with a rifle company in the Philippines. His experiences as an infantryman would be the genesis of his 1948 novel The Naked and The Dead.