Norman Mailer discharged from hospital

Pulitzer Prize-winning US author Norman Mailer has been released from a Boston hospital after spending five days undergoing tests…

Pulitzer Prize-winning US author Norman Mailer has been released from a Boston hospital after spending five days undergoing tests after complaining of breathing difficulties.

Mailer, 84, has adult onset asthma and was experiencing "laboured" breathing, his editorial assistant Dwayne Raymond Prickett confirmed today.

Prickett declined to say when Mailer was released or name the hospital where he was treated.

Mailer has since returned to his Provincetown home, is doing well and is preparing for his daughter's upcoming wedding, Prickett said.

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"There's not really any need for alarm," he said.

Mailer was scheduled to deliver public readings at the University of South Carolina on Sept. 25, and at the University of South Florida on Sept. 27, but those events were canceled, Prickett said.

Mailer gained fame in 1948 for his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead,based on his experiences as an infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II.

He won his first Pulitzer in 1969 for Armies of the Night, a nonfiction book about the anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon. He won the prize again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, about the life and execution of Utah murderer Gary Gilmore.