Devoted to show business and the entertainment industry

Norman Mailer, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes "The Armies of the Night" and "The Executioner's Song" died today at the age of 84.

"The Armies of the Night" also won a Medal for Disinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation in 2005.

You never knew where Mailer would go next in his public life, as he would always say enough about a passionate subject to get somebody mad at him. For example, as this article says: "Controversy and Mailer were lifelong partners. He challenged the notion of World War II as a "good war" in the '40s, championed sexual liberation in the '50s, marched against the Vietnam War in the '60s, clashed with feminists in the '70s.

"The preoccupations of his books--masculinity as combat, the literary life as competition, the hipster as cultural avatar, American life as repression, violence as redemption--were equally controversial."

To me that's another way of saying Mailer was his "own man," and he was - whether you agreed with him or not.

Over the last 50 years or so, because of his high-profile and controversial public life, Mailer was probably better known than any writer in America.

At the same time, a large number of people felt that even with his successes, he never reached the full potential of his extraordinary writing gifts.

One major contribution Mailer made, along with his contemporaries like Truman Copote, Gail Sheehy and Tom Wolfe was to use techniques usually reserved for fiction to make nonfiction more palatable. While it worked, many in the industry didn't like those techniques appled to the genre.

When it comes down to it, while Mailer was a great writer, he was an even better marketer of himself. The two together made him who he became in the public eye. And it sold a lot of books too.