FACTBOX: Five facts about Norman Mailer

(Reuters) - Norman Mailer, the pugnacious two-times Pulitzer Prize winner who was a dominating presence on the U.S. literary scene across seven decades, has died, at the age of 84, his editorial assistant said on Saturday.

Here are five facts about the author:

* His first book, "The Naked and the Dead," was published in 1948. It is considered one of the finest novels about World War Two and made him a celebrity at the age of 25.

* Mailer helped found the Village Voice alternative weekly newspaper in 1955.

* He was given a suspended sentence after stabbing his second wife, Adele, at a party in 1960. Doctors said he was paranoid and delusional.

* His Pulitzer Prize-winning "Armies of the Night," an account of the 1967 march on the Pentagon by anti-Vietnam War protesters, established him as a political spokesman for the Woodstock generation.

* His second Pulitzer was for "The Executioner's Song," a haunting 1979 account of the execution of Gary Gilmore in Utah.

(Compiled by Giles Elgood)