Comments on Norman Mailer Dead at 84

Certainly the end of an era. Anyone who remembers the Cavett show will remember Mailer's unpleasantness.

Maybe I'll attempt "Ancient Evenings" again.

I've always found him so personally off-putting I avoided his work.

Maybe now that he's dead, and not a LIVING asshole, I can read something.

Normally I like personally off-putting authors, but Mailer was never a favorite of mine. However, I did very much like his early journalism, in Esquire, when Esquire was a real magazine, with printed words and everything.

The Naked and the Dead is a book everyone should read, but the rest of his stuff never grabbed me.

Holy crap you really scared me for a second with that picture. I thought we had lost Judd Hirsch.

He tried to pick up my mom at a bar when she was nineteen (1971). She said he was the case-study of a creepy old man. Reading anything he has written seems to confirm this observation.

2: Yes, exactly.

The smartest things I ever heard he'd said were criticisms of George W. Bush's presidency.