Norman Mailer

Mailer studied aeronautical engineering at Harvard before being drafted into the Army and serving in a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippines, experience he turned directly into The Naked and the Dead, published when he was twenty-five and an immediate sensation. He cofounded The Village Voice in 1955 and spent decades cultivating a public persona as brawler, provocateur, and perennial candidate; he ran, and lost badly, for mayor of New York in 1969.

In 1960 he stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, nearly fatally, at a party, and pleaded guilty to assault rather than face a longer prison term. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction reworked as novel: The Armies of the Night, about an antiwar march on the Pentagon, and The Executioner's Song, about the killer Gary Gilmore.

Married six times, he remained a combative public figure until his death in 2007.