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.)
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.”