Norman Mailer was born in New Jersey in 1923 and then reared in Brooklyn. He began writing fiction before he graduated from Harvard University. His first major work, The Naked and the Dead, written in 1948, was received with great popular and critical acclaim. Mailer went on to win the Pulitzer Prize on two occasions, the first in 1968 with The Armies of the Night; the second in 1979 with The Executioner's Song. He was once acclaimed by poet Robert Lowell as 'the best journalist in America'. Mailer died in 2007.