Mailer, Voice of the 60's, Silenced

We're sorry to see Norman Mailer go. From what we read about him, we think we'd like to have met him. Just not at a dinner party.

Mailer's personal life was as turbulent as the times in which he lived. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, he stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed in her memoir how close she had come to dying.

Mailer's first book, "The Naked and the Dead," was published in 1948 while he was a postgraduate student in Paris. He passed nearly 60 years later in a hospital gown at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.

[AP]