Norman Mailer — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Norman Mailer was born Nachem Malech Mailer in Long Branch, New Jersey, on 31 January 1923. Both his parents were of Lithuanian Jewish descent, and his connection to the Russian Empire, to which Lithuania then belonged, runs through his grandparents' generation; published sources do not name the Lithuanian-born ancestors or their towns.
His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, known as Barney, an accountant, was born in South Africa to a Lithuanian Jewish family and came to the United States by way of London after the First World War. His mother, Fanny Schneider, came from a family that had arrived from Lithuania a generation earlier; her father was a rabbi. A grandfather kept a small hotel in Long Branch, where the family spent holidays. She ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. The family soon moved to Brooklyn, which Mailer later called the most secure Jewish environment in America, and his sister Barbara was born in 1927.
He went to public schools in Brooklyn and in 1943 graduated from Harvard with a degree in engineering science, having decided there to become a writer; in 1941 he had won a national college fiction prize. Drafted into the Army, he served as an infantryman in the Philippines, and drew on the experience for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, when he was twenty-five and studying in Paris on the GI Bill. It made his name at once.
In 1955 he was one of the founders of the weekly Village Voice. In the 1960s he turned increasingly to journalism and to a personal, novelistic non-fiction, and The Armies of the Night, his account of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and the National Book Award. The Executioner's Song (1979), his long account of the life and execution of Gary Gilmore, whom he never met, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980. Among his other books are An American Dream (1965), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) and The Fight (1975); he wrote twelve novels in fifty-nine years and also wrote plays and made films.
He died in New York on 10 November 2007, aged eighty-four, and is buried in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Tracing the roots — Lithuania (Russian Empire; town not documented)
Mailer was born Nachem Malech Mailer in Long Branch, New Jersey, on 31 January 1923, and grew up in Brooklyn. His father, Isaac Barnett "Barney" Mailer, was born in South Africa and emigrated to the United States after the First World War; his mother, Fanny Schneider, came from a family that had arrived from Lithuania a generation earlier. Both parents were of Lithuanian Jewish descent, and his maternal grandfather was a rabbi.
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Lithuania (Russian Empire; town not documented). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less."