I guess “Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84,” is better than “Norman Mailer, Novelist Who Stabbed His Wife, Dies at 84.”
I found Charles McGrath’s obit more entertaining than any of the Mailer I’ve tried to read, and I hope someday I can “reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.”
(Update: the NYTimes has changed the headline on its main page from “Outspoken Novelist” to “Towering Writer”! And the obit itself has gone to “Towering Writer With Matching Ego”!)
(Update #2: Two of the contemporary writers I respect most have implied that I’m sort of a bonehead for making that remark, and that I need to read An American Dream and Executioner’s Song, as well as Mailer’s early essays. I’ll put some on my wishlist.)
Comments
I’m not sure it matters what the headline reads – …… as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, “In the end, it is the writing that will count.”