Norman Mailer’s pursuit of that elusive beast, the great American novel, made him a dominant figure in the literary landscape for half a century.

If, in the end, he fell short of his goal, he left behind an outstanding war novel, The Naked and the Dead, and towering works of literary journalism culminating in The Executioner’s Song, a journey into the psyche of the murderer Gary Gilmore.

None of the characters portrayed in his many books was as colourful as Mailer himself. For better or worse, he became a master of the grand gesture, grappling with his inner demons and his outsize ego in front of a bemused public. Whether standing trial for stabbing his second wife, running for Mayor of New York or sparring with his boxer friends, Mailer revelled in his image as a rugged man of action.

His early years were conventional enough. Norman Kingsley Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Brooklyn. His father, Barney, made a modest living as an accountant and exerted much less of an influence on the young Mailer than the boy’s dynamic mother, Fanny, who ran her own oil-delivery firm and raised the money to pay for his college education. Years later, even when he was a successful, middle-aged writer, Mailer still made a habit of having breakfast with her.

Mailer studied aeronautical engineering at Harvard. But in his first year of college, in 1939, he acquired a passion for literature, plunging into the works of Faulkner, Fitzgerald and the gritty realist James T. Farrell. He became a leading light in Harvard’s literary circles; the quiet and polite undergraduate assumed the brash persona of a would-be Hemingway.

One of his early short stories attracted the interest of New York publishers, and after Pearl Harbour Mailer, with typical bravado, set himself the goal of writing the classic novel of the war. He had already completed two unpublished novels, one set in a mental asylum, before he enlisted in the army in 1944. He chose to join as a private in order to get as close as possible to an ordinary soldier’s view of military life. In the event, his service as a rifleman in a reconnaissance unit in the Philippines in the final months of the war was relatively uneventful.

Nevertheless, he drew on his memories of platoon life as well as reports of a three-day patrol behind enemy lines as he set to work on The Naked and the Dead. A vivid portrait of officers and GIs fighting on the fictional island of Anopopei, the novel unflatteringly depicted the upper ranks and captured the infantryman’s mixture of fear and boredom in graphic terms, although in keeping with the times he reduced a much-used swearword to the more acceptable “fug”. When the book was published in 1948, Mailer was catapulted into the front ranks of American writers. His new life as a celebrity had begun.

In retrospect, success on such an extravagant scale probably did more harm than good. As he was later to confess, he was still searching for his own voice when he finished The Naked and the Dead — Dos Passos was one obvious influence — and overnight fame cut him off from the everyday experiences which nourish a writer’s art. Instead of concentrating on mastering his craft he was drawn into constructing a persona for public consumption. As he put it: “I used to feel I was secretly the secretary to someone called Norman Mailer. To meet him, you had to meet me first.” The 25-year-old author mingled with the Hollywood aristocracy and expanded on his views of socialism at conferences with Arthur Miller and Shostakovich. His philosophy was laid bare in his second novel, Barbary Shore, a ponderous and symbolic tale of left-wing idealism. The book, published in 1951, met with a devastatingly negative reception. With the collapse of his first marriage, to Beatrice Silverman, Mailer slipped into a profound depression. Newly married to a tempestuous painter, Adele Morales, he began to roam Greenwich Village’s bohemian quarter in search of a new sensuality.

A convert to marijuana, jazz and the Reichian virtues of the perfect orgasm, he chafed at what he saw as the primness of the Eisenhower era and drew up plans for a cycle of no fewer than eight inter-related novels. The first of this unfinished saga, The Deer Park — a lurid tale inspired by the Hollywood blacklistings — appeared to mixed reviews in 1955. Mailer had earlier to endure the humiliation of seeing the manuscript rejected by several publishers on the grounds that it was too sexually explicit.

His confidence at a low ebb, he would not publish another novel for a decade. Instead he began to use his own personality as a vehicle for transforming society. One early step was the co-founding of the Village Voice newspaper, which provided him with a weekly platform in which he could launch his own fevered campaign against “the totalitarianism of the totally pleasant personality”. Mailer’s column was short-lived, but in the years that followed he emerged as the vanguard of the counterculture. He laid out part of his manifesto of “the Hip” in the 1957 essay The White Negro, which argued that black Americans’ daily experiences of violence and alienation provided the basis for a new American Existentialism. One passage — which would come back to haunt him in later years — talked in chillingly neutral terms of two young psychopaths’ murder of a shopkeeper: “Courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak 50-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so, no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.”

Mailer’s new role as an impresario of ideas, however ill-defined, was celebrated in his 1959 anthology, aptly titled Advertisements For Myself. In its pages he also promised to surprise the world with a major novel that would put him on a par with Dostoyevsky, Freud, Joyce and Proust.

But it took a bizarre act of violence to fix his place in the public’s imagination once and for all. His stormy relationship with Morales, fuelled by alcohol and drugs, reached a climax in 1960 when he attacked her with a knife, leaving her seriously injured. The incident took place at the end of a chaotic party at which he had planned to launch a campaign to run for Mayor of New York. Mailer was temporarily committed to Bellevue psychiatric hospital, and was given a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to thirddegree assault. Far from being contrite, he preferred to play to the gallery, even publishing a one-

sentence poem, Rainy Afternoon with the Wife: “So long as you use a knife, there’s some love left.”

He feuded with his fellow-novelists William Styron and James Jones, divorced Morales and in 1962 took the unlikely step of marrying Lady Jeanne Campbell, the grand-daughter of Lord Beaverbrook. The marriage, yet another tempestuous clash of wills, produced Mailer’s fourth child, but ended after a year. Looking back on its failure, Mailer drew on a metaphor from one of his favourite sports: “At least I can say I went two rounds with the best light-heavyweight the British ever sent over.”

He finally returned to the novel in 1965 with An American Dream — originally published in instalments in Esquire — in which a former war hero and congressman begins a descent into manic self-liberation by strangling his wife and throwing her body out of a high-rise window. The book sold well in spite of mixed reviews.

The young John Kennedy made an appearance in the first line of the novel; he had also been the subject of the non-fiction collection The Presidential Papers, published shortly before his assassination in 1963. Mailer had been an early convert to the Kennedy mystique, and the book, presented as a courtier’s half-comic tribute, contained a prescient 1960 profile, Superman Comes to the Supermarket. Aside from cultivating the image of Kennedy as an “existential hero”, (Mailer, typically, claimed that it helped JFK win the election) the article represented a fresh, highly subjective style of political reporting.

Mailer could lay claim to being one of the founders of the so-called “New Journalism”, a role he developed in his later books including The Armies of the Night (1968), his Pulitzer Prizewinning account of an anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon. Mailer relished placing himself at the centre of the narratives, often describing himself, with no undue modesty, in the third person. The tumult of the Sixties provided the perfect backdrop for his adventures: he pounded out lengthy essays against the deadline, dabbled in orgiastic, avant-garde film-making and finally mounted a bid for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York in 1969. With the acerbic columnist Jimmy Breslin as his running mate, and a campaign slogan of “No More Bulls**t”, Mailer talked of turning the city into America’s 51st state. Unlike most of his campaign workers, he also felt he had a serious chance of victory. In the event he finished fourth out of five contenders.

Mailer’s love affair with the counterculture was coming to an end in any case. Recoiling against the excesses of the hippy movement, he labelled himself, somewhat confusingly, as a “left conservative”. There were signs of disillusionment in Of a Fire on the Moon (1970). In this discursive account of the first Moon landing Mailer, who gave himself the code-name Aquarius, asked himself whether Nasa’s triumph represented the victory of Wasp conformity over the self-indulgent Left.

Mailer also found himself out of step with the new voices of the feminist movement. Female characters in his novels had always been one-dimensional, and his self-conscious machismo incurred the wrath of polemicists such as Germaine Greer and Kate Millett. Mailer responded in pugnacious style in the 1971 book The Prisoner of Sex, and he put on one of his more flamboyant displays in an eagerly awaited debate with Greer at New York’s Town Hall in March of that year. It was a high-spirited meeting of two heavyweight self-publicists; literary New York’s equivalent of the first fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

Mailer’s passion for the ring took him to Zaire in 1974, when he covered Ali’s historic defeat of George Foreman. The bizarre circumstances surrounding the bout, staged as a public relations stunt by the country’s dictator, President Mobutu, were reflected in Mailer’s colourful account, The Fight. Mailer regularly sparred with his friend, the light-heavyweight champion José Torres, and in Zaire he summoned up the energy for a night-time training run with Ali. The novelist, who regarded himself as the writing champ, found his 51-year-old legs were not up to the challenge, however, and walked home alone, musing on the possibilities of meeting his end at the hands of the lion that he had heard roaring somewhere in the dark.

His fascination with celebrity spurred him to write an extended love letter to Marilyn Monroe in the 1973 photographic collection, Marilyn. Women came and went in his private life. In 1979 he divorced his fourth wife, Beverly, mother of two of his sons. In 1980 Mailer married and divorced his girlfriend, Carol Stevens, in order to legitimise their daughter, and later that year he married his sixth wife, the glamorous Norris Church.

With unpaid taxes, alimony and child support payments weighing on his shoulders, Mailer was increasingly obliged to take on work for financial considerations alone. “Since I started needing all this money,” he later explained, “I’ve written twice as many books as I should have done, and maybe they’ve only been half as good as they should have been.”

Yet if he seemed destined to play out the rest of his career in the gossip columns, one of his greatest triumphs, The Executioner’s Song, lay just around the corner. His involvement with the project began when he was approached with a lucrative offer to write a book on Gary Gilmore, who was executed by firing squad in Utah in 1977. A fair part of the groundwork had already been done by Lawrence Schiller, Mailer’s collaborator on the Marilyn book, but Mailer’s novelistic gifts transformed the mass of interviews and court transcripts into the most compelling study of the criminal mind since Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Mailer muddied the waters by labelling the work “a true life novel”, evoking memories of Capote’s “a non-fiction novel”. The book was prefaced with an old prison rhyme beginning: “Deep in my dungeon/I welcome you here”. It had the touch of authenticity, but in the afterword Mailer explained that he had actually written the ballad a decade earlier for his cinematic fiasco, Maidstone.

Nevertheless, across an epic 1,000 pages, he turned Gilmore into a sympathetic, flesh-and-blood figure without losing sight of the seriousness of his crimes or the emptiness at the core of his personality.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980. Soon after his moment of triumph, however, Mailer plunged into perhaps the most disastrous episode of his life. During the writing of The Executioner’s Song he had begun a correspondence with Jack Henry Abbott, a convict and career criminal who had spent most of his adult life behind bars. Impressed by the quality of Abbot’s prose, his insights into prison violence and the alleged breadth of his reading, Mailer passed on his letters to the highly respected New York Review of Books. A selection was published by Random House in 1981.

By this time Mailer had helped to win early parole for Abbott, who had been convicted of killing a fellow-inmate. Mailer argued that Abbott had the makings of a major writer and promised him work as a research assistant. Prison doctors in Utah had warned that Abbott had a “hair-trigger temper” and was potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, radical, chic New York took Abbott to its heart, fêting him at dinners and cocktail functions. Abbott seemed the walking embodiment of Mailer’s pronouncements in The White Negro, but it soon became obvious that the ex-prisoner was unstable and ill at ease in his new life. Less than two months after his release, Abbott stabbed to death a young waiter, Richard Adan, after an altercation at a restaurant.

Mailer testified at Abbott’s trial the following year, calling for a light sentence in order that his protégé might pursue his calling. There were no words of sympathy for the victim’s family. Confronted afterwards by hostile reporters, he shouted: “I’m willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man’s talent. I am saying that culture is worth a little risk.” It said something for Mailer’s hold over the literary world that he continued to be taken seriously as a social commentator.

Attention soon turned to his long-awaited “big novel”, Ancient Evenings, a sprawling story of royal intrigues in Ancient Egypt which had taken a decade to complete and was finally published in 1983. After all the anticipation, the book’s copious descriptions of mystical rites and imperial bloodlettings left many reviews exhausted rather than exhilarated. Tough Guys Don’t Dance, a thriller written at speed in order to bring in much-needed income, made little impression the following year.

Mailer turned back to a mélange of fiction and current affairs. At more than 1,000 pages, Harlot’s Ghost — published in 1991 — was even longer than Ancient Evenings, and purported to give an alternative history of the CIA, centred on an obsessive anticommunist modelled on the real-life CIA spymaster, James Angleton.

More intrigue lay at the heart of Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995), which reconstructed the life and death of Lee Harvey Oswald. Mailer’s extensive researches in Eastern Europe drew on material released from the KGB’s files, but ultimately produced no new revelations about the events at Dallas.

In the same year Mailer ventured into art history in Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, subtitled “an interpretative biography”. The reviews were again poor, the New York Times declaring that the book “is less a real biography than an assemblage of other people’s words, glued together with Mr Mailer’s own musings and speculation”.

The run-up to publication was marred by allegations of plagiarism made by the distinguished Picasso biographer John Richardson. Mailer had been embroiled in a similar dispute over his book on Marilyn Monroe. Nontheless, he took on perhaps the ultimate challenge in 1997 with a life of Jesus.

Writing a biography of Christ would have been difficult enough; in The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer went a step further by writing in the first-person. Far from being a rumbustious first-century version of Mailer himself, the Saviour portrayed in the book was a surprisingly conventional historical figure. Reviewers were polite but largely unimpressed. After years of lurid headlines, Mailer was now being treated with the polite deference reserved for grand old men of literature whose day had past. In 1998 he produced a 1,200-page compendium of his fiction and non-fiction, The Time of Our Time.

His essay Why Are We at War? (2003) a protest against the US-led invasion of Iraq, was a clear echo of the sceptical novel from 1967, Why Are We in Vietnam? In 2005 he co-wrote, with his youngest child John Buffalo Mailer, a book entitled The Big Empty, subtitled “Dialogues on politics, sex, God, boxing, morality, myth, poker and bad conscience in America”. His final novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007) was an account of the youth of Adolf Hitler, narrated by a devil.

Mailer married six times. He is survived by his wife, Norris Church, and his eight children and a stepson.

Norman Mailer, writer, was born on January 31, 1923. He died on November 10, 2007, aged 84