"He'd taken a punch or two in his time and had the face to show for it: a blunt, square, serious face, meaty and mulish. Surliness simmered in Norman Mailer's eyes. The mouth always looked to be in midtwist, ready to snarl a profanity. Other people keep fire extinguishers handy; Mailer, you figured, kept a cold beefsteak within reach: In Case of Pummeling, Break Glass. But when he stopped arguing and started writing, all the knots in his soul untangled and out came a glorious, enchanted prose, precise in its descriptiveness but also radiantly ambitious and overarching.
"For Mailer, who died of kidney failure early Saturday at 84 in a New York hospital, no topic was too big -- God, Hitler, war, sex, history -- and no stylistic nuance too small to absorb anything less than his full attention. In an age when authors inspire mostly indifference, Mailer evoked hostility and passion. Trailing in his wake were dozens of books, nine kids, six wives, two Pulitzer Prizes, one run for New York mayor and countless feuds.
"'I've always wanted my books to be provocations,' he said in an interview last year, upon the publication of his novel 'The Castle in the Forest,' and he got his wish."
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