Mailer -- towering figure of U.S. literature

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

Mailer, whose brawls and provocative social and political stands were inseparable from his books, had undergone lung surgery in October.

In more than 40 books and many essays, Mailer fascinated, provoked and enraged readers, railing against subjects from the wars in Vietnam and Iraq to U.S. presidents and television.

His first novel "The Naked and the Dead" (1948), based on his personal experiences during World War Two, became an international best seller and established him as one of the leading novelists of his generation.

Mailer's works contained violence, sexual obsession and views that famously angered feminists. He later reconsidered many of his old positions but never surrendered his right to speak his mind.

He feuded with fellow authors such as Truman Capote, William Styron, Tom Wolfe and Norman Podhoretz and especially feminists like Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, who considered him the quintessential male chauvinist.

Some feuds even turned physical for the former college boxer, who stabbed one of his six wives at a party and also was known for decking writer Gore Vidal.

"The Naked and the Dead" is considered one of the finest novels about World War Two and made him a celebrity at age 25.

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.

Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on January 31, 1923, Mailer's middle-class Jewish family moved to Brooklyn when he was 4. He was only 16 when he entered Harvard University in 1939 to study aeronautical engineering.

After graduating, he was drafted into the Army in 1943 and served in the Philippines and Japan, gathering the experiences that helped him write "The Naked and the Dead." The book was a graphic portrayal of bloodshed, the prejudices and fears of the average American soldier and the irony of military tactics.

CULT FIGURE

Mailer helped found the Village Voice alternative weekly newspaper in 1955 and became a cult figure in intellectual circles two years later with an essay titled "The White Negro."

It drew parallels between American blacks and the alienation of the era's Beat Generation but was criticized by some blacks who said he had vastly over-romanticized their condition.

In 1960, Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele, at a party. Doctors said he was suffering "from acute paranoid breakdown with delusional thinking." He was given a suspended sentence.

In 1969, Mailer ran an exuberant, if unsuccessful, campaign for mayor of New York, proposing the city be made a U.S. state.

Mailer produced a number of improvised films featuring himself, his family and a smattering of professional actors. He also directed a more commercial project, "Tough Guys Don't Dance," a film version of his 1984 murder mystery. It starred Ryan O'Neal and Isabella Rosselini and became a camp classic.

In the late 1960s, Mailer ran head-on into the burgeoning feminist movement. The main clash came when Mailer attacked Millett's book, "Sexual Politics."

Mailer again became a focus of controversy in 1981 when he championed Jack Henry Abbott, a convict whose prison memoir "In the Belly of the Beast" became a literary hit. Shortly after being released, Abbott, who partly owed his freedom to Mailer's activism, stabbed a waiter to death and was convicted of manslaughter.

His involvement with Abbott was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about," he told the Buffalo News in 1992.

Mailer's latest novel, "The Castle in the Forest" about Adolf Hitler's formative years, appeared in January 2007.

Mailer had nine children.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)