Everyone but his second wife, Gore Vidal,  and veterans of the women’s liberation movement will miss Norman Mailer, dead at 84:

Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country’s literary conscience and provocateur with such books as “The Naked and the Dead” and “The Executioner’s Song” died Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.  Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author’s biographer.

Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, street-wise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.  He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women’s liberation.  But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, “In the end, it is the writing that will count.”

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