Enjoy an interview with Beverly Cleary.

Norman Mailer, one of the most visible and confrontational writers of the twentieth century, is dead at 84.

Mailer’s personal life sometimes overshadowed his writing: he once headbutted another writer, Gore Vidal, backstage at “The Dick Cavett Show.”  He also stabbed one of his six wives.

My experience with Mailer is somewhat limited–just a couple of essays and his Pulitzer Prize-winning, 1000-page The Executioner’s Song, a “true-life” novel about Gary Gilmore, a career criminal who was famously executed in Utah in the late 1970’s.  The story is true (and told with journalistic detachment), but the novel is a work of fiction, complete with fabricated elements.

If you want to learn more, try The New York Times, which has both an obituary and an appreciation.