Norman Mailer, one of the great American authors and journalists, passed away in New York City today. He was 84. You can read the AP and NY Times obits. He wrote novels and journalism and started the Village Voice. His his personal life was at times turbulent and conflicted, and like many great minds, you can argue he was deeply flawed.

Nonetheless, Mailer was one of my heroes, both for his absolutely uncompromising novelistic style (Take a peek at Why Are We in Vietnam?) and his vivid journalistic prose. Armies of the Night was his Pulitzer-Prize-winning coverage of the October, 1967 March on the Pentagon at the height of the Vietnam war. It is a richly detailed chronicle of that bizarre weekend, where Abby Hoffman and the hippies, with the permission of the General Services Administration, gathered to levitate the building. And it is also, like all Mailer's writing, a deeply penetrating look at what it meant to be alive, to be young, to be human, in the Sixties. Here's one of the many passages I have marked:

"A new generation of the American young had come along different from five previous generations of the middle class... Their radicalism was in their hate for the authority — the authority was manifest of evil in this generation. It was the authority who had covered the land with those suburbs where they had stifled as children, while watching the adventures of the West in the movies, while looking at the guardians of dull genial celebrity on television; they had their minds jabbed and poked and twitched and proved and finally galvanized into surrealistic modes of response by commercials cutting into dramatic narratives, and parents flipping from network to network — they were forced willy-nilly to build their idea of the space-time continuum (and therefore their nervous system) on the jumps and cracks and leaps and breaks which every phenomenon from the media seemed to contain within it.

Finally, this new generation of the Left hated the authority, because the authority lied. It lied through the teeth of corporation executives as Cabinet officials and police enforcement officers and newspaper editors and advertising agencies, and in its mass magazines, where the subtlest apologies for the disasters of the authority (and the neatest deformations of the news) were grafted in the best possible style into the ever-open mind of the walking American lobotomy: the corporation office worker and his high school son."

Yeah, that's the kind of vision that came from that first generation of pioneer writer/journalists, participant observers, gonzo newshounds on whose shoulders we bloggers stand. We have few left who can wield such a combination of heart, mind, and talent, and our public discourse is the worse for it. But we can take a moment to reflect, and to celebrate, and to remember why the struggle is worth while.

As he concludes in Armies of the Night, "For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep."

So long, Norman.