Norman Mailer, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the greatest American writers, died today of renal failure. Mailer, who was 84 years old, was considered one of the most innovative and diverse writers in the United States, with his provocative novels and essays often igniting discussions.

He fought to the very end, undergoing an operation in October to remove scar tissue from around his lung.

Mailer resided in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with his wife of 33 years, Norris Church Mailer, and maintained an apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by nine children, Susan, Danielle, Elizabeth, Kate, Michael, Stephen, Maggie, Matthew and John Buffalo; ten grandchildren; a sister, Barbara Wasserman, and a nephew Peter Alson.

Norman Mailer was born on January 31, 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, as a son of Isaac, a South African-born accountant and Fanny, who came to the US at age 2 when her parents fled a wave of anti-Semitism in Lithuania.

In 1943, Mailer earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard but soon he was enrolled in the US army and he fought in Philippines as an infantryman,

His war experience inspired his first novel The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948 while he was a postgraduate student in Paris. The novel was named one of the “100 best novels in English language” by the Modern Library.

“I understand one element of celebrity, which is the unreality of it,” he said later. “At the age of 25 I went from being the kid next door ... to being called a major American writer - that's a role you just don't fit at 25. ... I used to feel I was secretary to someone named Norman Mailer, (and) to meet him you had to meet me first.”

After a stint in Hollywood writing screenplays, Mailer wrote two more novels, Barbary Shore (1951), a novel of the Cold War, and The Deer Park (1955), a Hollywood novel about artistic integrity. In 1959 he published Advertisements For Myself, a showcase of all his previous work and his ambitious pans for the future, which uses his personality as the volume's armature.

Ten years later in 1969, Norman Mailer won his first Pulitzer prize for The Armies of the Night, a non-fiction narrative of the anti-Vietnam War March on the Pentagon. The book also won the National Book Award and

In 1979, Mailer won his second Pulitzer prize for The Executioner's Song, which chronicled the life and death of Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, the first person to be executed after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

Mailer wrote also many journalistic pieces, plays, poems and screenplays in a career spanning six decades. His latest book, On God: an Uncommon Conversation, was published on October 16th. “My connection to religion is inner and personal,” Mailer said in his book. “I believe that God exists, because I lived for years as an atheist and found it very difficult to explain to myself philosophically how we could come into existence ex nihilo (from nothing).”

As an avid anti-war activist he was arrested at a demonstration against the Vietnam war in 1967, and he also clashed with feminists because of his macho ways, his multiple marriages and his portrayal of all women as man-haters by virtue of their very biology.

In 1971, Mailer wrote "The Prisoner of Sex", an acid commentary on the women's movement that rankled feminist. The novel was a response to Kate Millett's charges of sexism in her “Sexual Politics” in which she portrayed Mailer as the ultimate male chauvinist pig.

Mailer is famous also for his non-fiction works like biographies of Marilyn Monroe and Lee Harvey Oswald, and The Fight (1975), an account of the famous heavyweight boxing fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

Mailer’s 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe has become a subject of controversies because in its final chapter he implied that she was murdered by agents of the FBI and CIA, because of her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy.

“The last chapter of Marilyn, where I speculated on the possibility of her being murdered. It was not good journalism”, Mailer later said in an interview.

Beside his prolific activity as a writer and journalist, (he has written for at least 75 different magazines and journals and had published 39 books, including 11 novels) Norman Mailer directed also four movies: Wild 90 and Beyond the Law in 1967, Maidstone in 1968 and Tough Guys Don't Dance in 1987.

But maybe Norman Mailer was best known as a co-founder of the Village Voice weekly newspaper, and along with Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Joan Didion, as a pioneer of New Journalism, a style that combined actual events and characters told in novelistic form.

Mailer was an ardent critic of US President George W Bush and the Iraq war, declaring “this is the worst war this country has ever been in, absolutely the worst. We never had a leader who has been as stupid as the leader to this war.”