Born: Jan 31, 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey

Died: 10 November 2007 (renal failure)

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U.S. novelist. He studied at Harvard University. He drew on his wartime service in the Pacific for his celebrated novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), which established him as one of the major American writers of the postwar decades. A flamboyant and controversial figure who often enjoyed antagonizing critics and readers, he has since commanded less respect for his fiction — which also includes the novels An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) — than for journalistic works that convey actual events with the richness of novels, including The Armies of the Night (1968, Pulitzer Prize); Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968); Of a Fire on the Moon (1970); and The Executioner's Song (1979, Pulitzer Prize), about the execution of a murderer. Mailer was a favourite target of feminists in the 1960s and '70s.

This is his most accomplished and his most problematic work...Ancient Evenings achieves the magnitude which can give a retrospective order and enhancement to everything else...Spellbinding...Stunning...This is his most audacious book largely because behind it all is the desire, once and for all, to claim some ultimate spiritual and cultural status for the teller of stories, the Writer." ----Richard Poirer, The London Times Literary Supplement

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"A major novel of our time...Ancient Evenings is an impressive performance even for so gifted a novelist as Norman Mailer. With the power of his imagination he has breathed life into an extinct civilization, eloquently and convincingly." ----John Barkham Reviews

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"Sensuous, superbly written...A symphony of spirit and earth, of smoldering sex and slumbering tombs...Mailer enchants and transports across a gulf of centuries and civilizations, yet the fears and lusts he irradiates with his gifts are unchanged millennia later." ----Cosmopolitan

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"Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer makes a miraculous present out of age-deep memories, bringing to life the rhythms, the images, the sensuousness of a lost time." ----Mary Lee Settle, The New York Times

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"Mailer's Egypt is a haunting and magical place, primeval, mysterious. The reader wallows in the scope, depth, the sheer magnitude and-yes-the fertility of his imagination." ----Washington Post Book World

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"A Remarkable book, an amazing feat of imaginative speculation...The imagery is lush and provocative...Mailer has drawn his characters with great care and compassion." ----St. Louis Post-Dispatch