Norman Mailer (Cyclopedia of World Authors)

Norman Kingsley Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on January 31, 1923. Much of his childhood was spent in Brooklyn, New York, where he lived in a Jewish neighborhood. He has never written about his upbringing, but it is clear from several published accounts of his life that he took to literature quite early—even though he earned an engineering degree from Harvard University. By the time of his college graduation, he had thoroughly absorbed the writing of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos and was bent on becoming a great war novelist. He served as a rifleman in the Pacific...

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