Louis Menand: The Disputed Career of Norman Mailer: The New Yorker The world has long since finished having its Norman Mailer conversation, but few writers in their day received as much attention. Mailer made himself into a figure about whom everyone felt the need to have a view, and there was a lot to have a view about. Mailer wrote fiction, drama, poetry, biography, journalism, screenplays, newspaper columns, and a "true-life novel." His first book, "The Naked and the Dead," came out when he was twenty-five, in 1948, and was a Times No. 1 best-seller for eleven weeks, and he had at least one book on the best-seller list in every decade after that until his death, in 2007. He won two Pulitzer Prizes - for "The Armies of the Night," in 1969, and "The Executioner's Song" (the true-life novel), in 1980. He directed and acted in three underground movies, one of which Pauline Kael called "the worst movie that I've stayed to see all the way through." He produced an Off Broadway play, based on his third novel, "The Deer Park," which was a flop, and directed a Hollywood feature film, "Tough Guys Don't Dance," adapted from another of his novels, which managed to break even despite being nominated for Golden Raspberry Awards in seven categories. He appeared often, sometimes raucously, on talk shows and in various public venues. He was interviewed more than seven hundred times, and he wrote forty-five thousand letters. . . .