Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
روائي امريكي ولد عام 1923 وتوفي عام 2007
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact - based journalism. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with John Wilcock, Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
In 1992, Mailer received the annual Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award presented by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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Innovator of the nonfiction novel, a towering figure in American literature for nearly 60 years. Norman Mailer developed in the 1960s and 1970s a form of journalism that combined actual events, autobiography, and political commentary with the richness of the novel. (See also Truman Capote and the classic "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood.) Mailer's works always stirred controversy - because of both their stylish nonconformity and his controversial views of American life. The poet Robert Lowell praised him as "the best journalist in America",but what he thought of Mailer's fiction was left open.
'"I decided the only explanation is that God and the Devil are very attentive to people at the summit. I don't know if they stir much in the average man's daily stew, no great sport for spooks, I would suppose, in a ranch house, but do you expect God or the Devil left Lenin and Hitler and Churchill alone? No. They bid for favors and exact revenge. That's why men with power sometimes act so silly."' (from An American Dream, 1965)
Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, but he was raised in Brooklyn, New York.
ولد في نيوجرسي ونشأ في بروكلن نيويورك
Every summer the family went back to Long Branch, where Mailer's grandparents had a small summer hotel.
كان يزور جده في مكان مولده في كل صيف حيث كان الجدي يملك فندقا
Mailer's father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was an accountant and businessman. The dominant figure in the family was Mailer's mother, the former Fanny Schneider, who worked in a small trucking company.
كان والده محاسب ورجل اعمال اما الام فكانت هي الشخصية المسيطرة في العائلة وكانت تعمل في مجال النقاليات الشاحنة
Mailer's first literary effort was a 250-page story called 'Invasion From Mars', which he penned at the age of nine in notebooks. However, it was not until he attended Harvard that he decided to become a writer. In 1939 he graduated from Boys High School and then studied at Harvard University, Cambridge (1939-43), receiving B.S. in aeronautical engineering.
تخرج عام 1939 من المدرسة الثانوية ودرس في جامعة كامبرج في مجال الهندسه حيث تخرج عام 1943
In 1941 Mailer's 'The Greatest Thing in the World' won Story magazine's college contest.
During World War II Mailer served as a sergeant in the United States Army. Originally he wanted to go to Europe and be in the first wave of invasion troops, but for his disappointment he was sent to the South Pacific. Mailer served in Leyte, Luzon, and Japan, observing what happened on the war scene. He saw a little bit of action but not as much as it was in THE NAKED AND THE DEAD (1948). Most of the time in the Philippines Mailer felt tired.
خدم خلال الحرب العالمية الثانية في الجيش الأمريكي برتبة ضابط وقد خدم في منطقة المحيط الباسيفيكي وكان يشاهد ما يجري في الحرب ولم يشترك في القتال كثيرا لكنه كان يشعر بالتعب خلال وجوده في الفلبيين
In his letters to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, he described patrols he was on during the war - Mailer did not want to carry notes with him. In 1946 he was discharged, and the next year he enrolled at the Sorbonne.
تم تسريحه من الجيش في عام 1946 وفي السنة التاليى انضم الى جامعة الصوربون
The Naked and Dead was born in fifteen months, and published when Mailer was just 25. "Its success rips away my former identity," Mailer once said. The Naked and The Dead drew upon the author's combat experiences in the Philippines. It is not so funny as Heller's Catch-22 or Jaroslav Hašek's Good Soldier Schweik, but more realistic than Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front, and not so sentimental as Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. The story depicts a group of American soldiers who are stationed on the Japanese-held island in the Pacific. Flashbacks that illuminate their past mix with feverish combat scenes. On its appearance the work was hailed as one of the finest American novels of WW II, but also dismissed as obscene, plainly motivated by personal disgust with army life
كتب روايته عن تجربته في الجيش ومشاهداته وقد نشرت الرواية وهو في سن الخامسة والعشرين واعتبرت روايته واحده من أفضل الروايات الأمريكية التي كتبت عن الحرب العالمية الثانية
In England, several publishers rejected it because of the obscenity of its language. - "It is virtually a Kinsey Report on the sexual behavior of the GI. Its style is an almost pure Army billingsgate that will offend many readers, although in no sense is it exaggerated: Mr. Mailer's soldiers are real persons, speaking the vernacular of human bitterness and agony. It gives off a skyglow that is quite faithful to the spectrum of battle, and exposes the blood, if not always the guts, of war." (David Dempsey in The New York Times, May 9, 1948)
In the late 1940s Mailer worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter. He moved in 1951 to Greenwich Village in New York City.
عمل كاتب سيناريوا في هوليود عام 1940 وانتقل في عام 1951 الى نيويورك
Mailer's third novel, THE DEER PARK (1955), was about the corruption of values in Hollywood. Several publishers refused to accept the manuscript. Mailer felt he was an outlaw; he listened to jazz and smoked marijuana.
روايته الثالثة كانت عن الخلل في المثل في ساحة هوليود وقد رفض كثيرون نشرها وكان يشعر وكأنه خارج عن القانون وكان جل ما يفعله هو الاستماع لموسيقى الجاز ويدخن الميراوانا
In the thinly veiled story Mailer dealt with his relationship with Adele Morales, an artist whom he married in 1954. The following years in the authors life were more or less chaotic, and in 1960 he stabbed Adele at the end of an all-night party in Manhattan with "a dirty three-inch penknife." Mailer was given a suspended sentence because Adele refused to press charges. Her own account of the circumstances she recorded much later in the book of memoirs, The Last Party (1997).
تزوج من فنانه اسمها ادلي موراليس وقد اخذت حياته بعد الزواج منحى مضطرب ومشوش وقام بطنع زوجته في العام 1960 بسكين قذرة وقد حكم عليه بالحكم الاداري لان الزوجة تنازلت عن حقها في القضية
In the mid-1950s Mailer started to gain fame as an anti-establishment essayist. He had read Marx's Das Kapital and later said that it helped him to become a better writer.
اخذت في الخمسينات يكتب مقالات ضد النظام وقد اطلع على الفكر الماركسي
However, he did not believe that Communism would solve all problems. In 1961 Mailer wrote an open letter to Fidel Castro, saying "you are giving us hope".
في العام 1961 كتب خطاب الى كاسترو وقال له فيها انك تمنحنا الامل
In his notorious essay 'The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster' (1956) was originally published in Dissent and reprinted in ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959). Mailer examined violence, hysteria, crimes and confusion in American society through the fashionable existentialist framework, which owes much to Jean Genet.
في العام 1956 كتب مقالة عن العنف والهستيريا والاجرام والارباك في المجتمع الامريكي
After the difficult, tumultuous period, Mailer realized that he could write well about people like himself - people without roots, such as Henry Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, and Picasso.
اكتشف ميلر ادرك انه بامكانه ان يكتب عن اناس ليس لهم اصل مثل هنري ملر ومارلين منرو ومحمد علي وبيكاسو
In the 1960s Mailer was listed among the New Journalists, who applied the techniques of the novel to depict real events and people. He co-founded and named the Village Voice, one of the earliest underground American newspapers. He was a columnist ("Big Bite") at Esquire (1962-63) and Commentary (1962-63), a member of the executive board (1968-73), and the president (1984-86) of PEN American Center. In 1969 he was an independent candidate for mayor of New York City. Mailer's campaign slogan was "No more bullshit." He came fourth with about 5 per cent of the vote.
في العام 1969 كان مشرح مستقل لعمدة نيويورك وكان شعاره الانتخابي " لا مجال لمزيد من القرف"
THE PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS (1963) established Mailer as one of the most vigorous essayists in America. He wanted to advise President Kennedy, but he did not like Lyndon Johnson's face. "Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the Gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision." (from The Presidential Papers, 1963)
He used in THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT (1968) the techniques of fiction, and studied his own reactions as a barometer of the events themselves. The work won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. In the same vein he wrote MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO (1968) and OF A FIRE ON THE MOON (1970). In CANNIBALS AND CHRISTIANS (1966) Mailer accused American writers of not being able to produce works that would "clarify a nation's vision of itself".
When Mailer started to cover the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions in the 1960s, he placed himself at the center of American political and cultural life and also reported his observations on the civil rights movement, political assassinations and other upheavals. Mailer published essays in popular and men's magazines, such as Esquire and Playboy, as well as in more intellectual journals like Dissent, Commentary, and the New York Review of Books. "It is not routine to bring off a long novel when your ambition is more than major, when you will settle for nothing less than an attempt to write a great novel, and when you are into your sixties and not all that well." (Norman Mailer in The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1998)
Mailer's outspoken style led him in the 1970s into collision course with feminist movement. In THE PRISONER OF SEX (1971) Mailer proposed that gender might determine the way a person perceives and orders reality. He was labelled as the quintessential male chauvinist pig in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Mailer wrote a biography of the life and career of Marilyn Monroe, and published a highly successful true life novel, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG (1979) - In Cold Blood in Mailer's style. The story about the life and death of a convicted killer Gary Gilmore was based on face to face interviews, documents, records of court proceeding, and Mailer's trips to Utah and Oregon. THE FIGHT (1975) was an account of the legendary bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Mobutu's totalitarian Zaïre. Mailer's vision of boxing bears similarities to Hemingway's picture of bullfighting, both of them classed as creative art.
In the 1980s Mailer had become tired of politics. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1984 he realized that it was not "the evil empire" but a "poor, third-world country".
في عام 1980 أصبح متعبا من السياسة وعندما زار الاتحاد السوفيتي في العام 1984 أدرك أنها ليست الجمهورية الشيطانية وإنما هي دولة من دول العالم الثالث الفقيرة
Norman Kingsley Mailer was born to a well-known Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey.
من عائلة يهوديه من جنوب افريقيا
After graduating in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. In World War II, he served in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry. He was not involved in much combat and completed his service as a cook, but the experience provided enough material for The Naked and the Dead.
التحق بالجيش عام 1943 بعد تخرجه وعمل كطباخ لكن التجربة كانت كافية لتدفعة لكتابة رواية عن الفترة التي قضاها في الجيش
In 1980, The Executioner's Song—Mailer's novelization of the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore—won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
His final novel, The Castle in the Forest, which focused on Hitler's childhood, reached number five on the Times best-seller list after publication in January 2007, and received stronger reviews than any of his books since The Executioner's Song. Castle was intended to be the first volume of a trilogy, but Mailer died several months after it was completed. The Castle in the Forest was awarded a Bad Sex in Fiction Award by the Literary Review magazine.
Biographical subjects
His biographical subjects included Pablo Picasso, Muhammad Ali, Gary Gilmore, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Marilyn Monroe.
Personal life
Marriages and children
Norman Mailer was married six times and had nine children. He fathered eight children by his various wives and also raised and informally adopted Norris' son from another marriage, Matthew.
تزوج ستة مرات وأنجب 8 أطفال من زوجاته المتعددات كما تبنى طفل لاحد الزوجات من زواج سابق
Norman's first marriage was in 1944, to Beatrice Silverman, whom he divorced in 1952. They had one child, Susan.
كانت أولى زيجاته عام 1944 وانجب طفلة واحدة
Mailer died of acute renal failure on November 10, 2007, a month after undergoing lung surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, New York.
توفي عام 2007 بسبب فشل في الرئة
The papers of the two-time Pulitzer Prize author may be found at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.
In 2008, Carole Mallory, a former mistress, sold seven boxes of documents and photographs to Harvard University, Norman Mailer's Alma Mater. They contain extracts of her letters, books and journals. Mailer was widely quoted, e.g. "Culture is worth a little risk" (see link below to "Wikiquotes": Mailer quotes).

Born in 1923, the son of a South African Jew, and an adoring mother, Mailer was given the middle name Kingsley-- after malech, Hebrew for king. Later, his mother said, "I thought Norman was perfect"--an opinion she held throughout life. (Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times, New York, Penguin Books, 1985) But Mailer's father was a struggling accountant, and the young prince grew up working class--in the grimy New York borough of Brooklyn.
نشأ في عائلة من الطبقة العاملة
The streets of Crown Heights during the Depression provided some education--with their hardness, neighborhood rivalries, and "fug you too" philosophy. No wonder in later years Norman would survive decades of literary wars and misalliances.
نشأ في زمن الازمة الاقتصادية التي اثرت على طبيعة الثقافة والمزاج العام في الشارع الذي احتدت فيه الصراع ولذلك تمكن النجاة من الحروب الأدبية التي خاضها لاحقا
But as the son of ambitious parents, Norman may have learned that survival skills are not an entree into the Establishment--for that a degree was required and a classy one too. So, like many city boys, Norman burned up the public school competition and enrolled in Harvard--determined, at 17, to become-- as he put it--a "major writer." His tuition was paid by a rich uncle, a chocolate manufacturer who had invented the chocolate covered cherry.
كان يدفع اقساطه الجامعية عم غني يعمل في صناعة الشيكولاته