Episode Details

Norman Mailer won two Pulitzer Prizes, ran for mayor of New York, stabbed his wife with a penknife at a party, and spent fifty years picking fights with every writer, critic, and feminist who crossed his path. He was the most talented and most destructive literary ego of the postwar era — a man who wrote The Naked and the Dead at twenty-five and spent the next five decades trying to top it.

This episode traces Mailer from his Brooklyn childhood through the overnight fame of his war novel, the New Journalism, his mayoral campaign, and the violent personal life that shadowed his literary achievements.

• The Naked and the Dead, published when he was twenty-five, became the defining American novel of World War II
• He stabbed his second wife Adele Morales at a party in 1960, nearly killing her
• He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song
• He ran for mayor of New York City in 1969 on a platform that included making the city the fifty-first state