Norman Mailer, who reportedly died Saturday of kidney failure, was a giant and "enfant terrible" of American literature who provoked and inspired readers for more than a half a century while chronicling post-WWII America.
A prodigious writer, Mailer's work spanned nearly six decades with his last book "The Castle in the Forest" appearing just a few months ago.
But it was his first novel "The Naked and the Dead" which was to carve out Mailer's towering reputation in the literary world when it soared to the top of the New York Times best-seller list shortly after being published in 1948.
Almost overnight the Harvard University graduate and World War II veteran became a literary star, even though he was just 25 years old.
The book was based on his experiences serving in the Pacific during the war, and depicted a platoon of US soldiers fighting and dying on the Japanese-controlled Pacific island of Onopopei.
"A man who went to a famous prep school in the early '20s said afterward, 'It was the worst experience of my life and the most valuable.' I can say the same about my time in the US Army," Mailer said in 2005.
Over the decades, Mailer penned more than 40 works with diverse styles and themes, including the haunting novel "An American Dream" in 1965.
He achieved the rare honor of being awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice -- once for "The Armies of the Night" (1968), which also won the National Book Award, and then again for "The Executioner's Song" (1979), an account of the life and death of Utah murderer Gary Gilmore which was later turned into a movie starring Tommy Lee Jones.
"Rereading the bulk of my work ... one theme came to predominate," Mailer reflected in an imposing anthology published in May 1998, when he marked half a century as a writer.
"It was apparent that most of my writing was about America. How much I loved my country -- that was evident -- and how much I didn't love it at all," he said in anthology "The Time of our Time."
"Our noble ideal of democracy was forever being traduced, sullied, exploited, and downgraded through a non-stop reflexive patriotism. And every decade our great land lay open more and more to all the ravages of greed."
A poet, director, occasional film actor, even a New York City mayoral candidate in 1969, Mailer loved to mix literary genres -- as he did in his fictionalized "biography" of screen legend Marilyn Monroe.
Throughout his career Mailer was fascinated with fame and celebrity, writing books about Pablo Picasso, Muhammad Ali and Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1997 he published "The Gospel According to the Son," a novel narrated by Jesus Christ.
A co-founder of the leftist newspaper the Village Voice in the mid-1950s, Mailer spent his most life giving vent to his rage. He was jailed several times during the early 1960s for brawling, and again in 1967 for protesting the US role in Vietnam.
He captured the rebellious spirit of the 1960s in "The Armies of the Night," a highly personalized, novel-like account of a peace march in Washington.
The biographer, reporter and author of anti-establishment and political work championed along with Truman Capote the genre of "creative non-fiction" and his work was hailed as a prime example of "new journalism."
Mailer's other works of journalism include "A Fire on the Moon," about the Apollo 11 lunar mission.
But Mailer was never far from controversy, and he angered many feminists for his portrayal of women.
His 1971 essay "The Prisoner of Sex" was his bilious response to the emerging women's liberation movement, and prominent feminist Kate Millet once labeled him "the ultimate male chauvinist pig."
His 1973 biography of Monroe also ran into criticism after he suggested that she had been murdered by the FBI and the CIA over her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy.
Married six times and the father of nine children, Mailer once said in an NBC television interview that he was worried "women are going to take over the world."
"There's a real possibility in my mind ... that 100 years from now, there will be 100 men left on Earth, and the women will have it all to themselves," he said.
Born in Long Branch, New Jersey on January 31, 1923, Mailer entered Harvard University at age 16. Shortly after graduating with an engineering degree in 1943, he served in the Philippines with the 12th Armored Cavalry regiment from Texas.
Time did not dull his prodigious talent or his razor-sharp tongue.
Late in life Mailer dismissed modern architecture as "a disgrace" and "a disaster." "America's gotten much uglier in the last 25 years," he told NBC television.