Norman Mailer – Jupiter Neptune with a cruel streak

Novelist Norman Mailer was once lauded as a high IQ prodigy, described (by himself and others) as ‘the best writer in the USA’, and paid prodigious sums of money by publishers after his initial success of The Naked and the Dead. But ultimately he came to be seen as ‘imbecilic and ludicrous’, writing ‘worthlessly derivative’ books. Evelyn Waugh once called him “a swarthy gangster straight out of a madhouse”.  A new biography is no more compleme