Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Norman Mailer has died aged 84.
The pugnacious New Jersey novelist, playwright, screen writer / director and polemicist was a dominating presence on the US literary scene for seven decades.
Norman Mailer pictured in 2000.
In more than 40 books, essays and journalism, Mailer provoked and enraged readers with his strident views on US political life, and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
He first book, The Naked and the Dead, is considered one of the finest novels about World War Two and made him a celebrity at age 25 when published in 1948.
Mailer's works were often filled with violence, sexual obsession and views that angered feminists. He later reconsidered many of his old positions but never surrendered his right to speak his mind.
Detractors considered him an intellectual bully and he feuded with fellow authors like Truman Capote, William Styron, Tom Wolfe and Norman Podhoretz.
Feminists like Germaine Greer and Kate Millett considered him the quintessential male chauvinist.
Some of the feuds even turned physical for the former college boxer, who stabbed one of his six wives at a party and also decked writer Gore Vidal.
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 31st, 1923, Mailer's middle-class Jewish family moved to Brooklyn when he was 4.
Novelist Norman Mailer arm wrestling with then heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali on the terrace of their San Juan hotel in 1965.
He was only 16 when he entered Harvard in 1939 to study aeronautical engineering. After graduating, he was drafted into the US army in 1943 and served in the Philippines and Japan.
Mailer helped found the alternative weekly newspaper Village Voicein 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 criticised by some blacks who said he had vastly over-romanticised their condition.
In 1969, he ran an exuberant, if unsuccessful, campaign for mayor of New York, proposing the city be made a US state.
He produced a number of improvised films featuring himself, his family and a some professional actors. He also directed a more commercial project, Tough Guys Don't Dance, a film version of his 1984 murder mystery.
Mailer again attracted controversy in 1981 when he championed Jack Henry Abbott, a convict whose prison memoir In the Belly of the Beastbecame 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.
Mailer's last novel, The Castle in the Forest, about Adolf Hitler's formative years, appeared in January 2007.
Dwayne Prickett, Mailer's editorial assistant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, confirmed his death. He had undergone a lung operation last month.