Sometimes, it takes an addict: Norman Mailer
Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer, dead of renal failure at 84. Mailer transformed American journalism by introducing to nonfiction some of the techniques of the novelist and by placing himself, a brilliant, flawed and larger-than-life character, at the center of his reporting. Mailer was drunk or stoned during most of the 1950s, tried to feed vodka to a horse, which bit him in return, and stabbed and seriously wounded his second of six wives in 1960. Among other controversies, he ran for mayor of New York City in 1969, campaigning to secede from New York and make the City the 51st state. He entered into a long feud with feminists after debating Germaine Greer in 1971 and declared himself an “enemy of birth control.” After helping Jack Henry Abbott, a Utah prison inmate, publish a series of letters in an acclaimed volume, In the Belly of the Beast, Mailer lobbied to have him paroled. A few weeks after his release in 1981, Abbott killed a man in New York and Mailer’s champion turned to national outrage. In 1980, he wed and divorced his fifth wife within a few days to grant legitimacy to their daughter and later that year married his final wife, to whom he apparently remained happily married until his death. At this point, Mailer became, shall we say, boring–chastened perhaps by the Abbott episode, stabilized by marriage. I would say he was obviously sober except for idiotic remarks he made in 2001, blurting out that America probably deserved the 9-11 attacks and calling the rubble of Ground Zero “more beautiful than the buildings” it replaced.