Norman Mailer Dies at 84

The American writer Norman Mailer died on the 10th of November and this is indeed a literary loss.
Mailer was nothing if not controversial, however the controversy he usually engendered was culturally and literarily relevant.

He married six times, refused not to comment on unpopular topics, and went after interesting political, social, and literary topics obssessively.

Many blogs were written about Mailer this past weekend and I was surprised to read some which depicted him as mediocre and irrelevant. He was anything but.

Today, however, I read a good tribute to him on the Huffington Post by Arianna Huffington.

Huffington, herself one with the literary bug and one who knew Mailer personally, wrote a respectful entry celebrating Mailer's idiosyncracies.

Huffington's winning sentence was: "Mailer was all about possibility -- about asking why things are the way they are and showing, through his writing, there are other ways they could be."

I felt compelled to comment on her piece as well and I just posted the following:

"If we don't take a minute to positively review the life of one who so frequently provided us with text, then we're not being respectful of his literary contribution to us. If nothing else, Mailer was indeed relevant and dialog-inviting and that, especally at the end of one's life, should beg for positive attention.
He was after all, a great American text himself."


graph per huffington post