Husband to six and father of nine, Mailer’s tumultuous personal life was fueled by bouts of heavy drug and alcohol use. He earned notoriety (and the scorn of feminists) by stabbing his second wife with a penknife while at a party. He scrapped frequently (literally and figuratively) and publicly with his peers, most notably with Gore Vidal. He ran for Mayor of the city of New York and dabbled in filmmaking. He made countless television appearances.

His books dealt with the cultural and political touchstones of the era — the war in Viet Nam, the violence and unrest surrounding the political conventions of 1968, the lunar landing, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus Christ, Lee Harvey Oswald, and most recently, Hitler — and have painted a bold canvas of the past several decades. His metaphysical examinations of his subject matter might give you pause for thought, cause for disagreement, might even irk you, but I never tired of watching and reading, and I was certainly never bored. If Truman Capote invented the non-fiction novel with In Cold Blood, one might argue that Mailer brought it to the peak of perfection with The Executioner's Song. Based on exhaustive research, the 1979 Pulitzer Prize winner tells the tale of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, executed by the state of Utah in 1977. Lyrical and compelling, and as immense in scope as the blue western sky under which its events transpire, it is Mailer's best work.

Lying next to my bedside at the moment, half-finished, is The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, published earlier this year. A fictional account of the childhood of Adolf Hitler, the tale is narrated by the devil, and like much of Mailer's work, deals with the issues of good, evil, and choice. His body of work has earned him a place among the major literary figures of the 20th century. If the times in which he lived lent themselves to excessive self-examination - and few eras of modern history have been chewed over as thoroughly - it's hard to imagine examining them from a more compelling point of view than Mailer's.