Norman Mailer Dead at 84

Norman Mailer -- author of more than 30 works and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize -- is dead at 84. He died Saturday, November 10, 2007, of renal failure.

In an interview with The Times upon the release of his last book, Mailer said,

. . . "In two years I will have been a published novelist for 60 years. That’s not true for very many of us." And he recalled something he had said at the National Book Award ceremony in 2005, when he was given a lifetime achievement award: that he felt like an old coachmaker who looks with horror at the turn of the 20th century, watching automobiles roar by with their fumes.

"I think the novel is on the way out," he said. "I also believe, because it’s natural to take one’s own occupation more seriously than others, that the world may be the less for that."

The New York Times obituary: Norman Mailer, Towering Writer with Matching Ego, Is Dead

Slideshow of Norman Mailer images, from The New York Times

A collection of remembrances of Norman Mailer by Marlon Brando, Liz Smith, Irving Howe, Diana Trilling, Edward Abbey, Germaine Greer, and other notables, compiled by Dana Cook at Salon.com: Norman Mailer 1923 - 2007