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Pulitzer winner Norman Mailer hospitalized

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer spent the Labor Day weekend in a hospital with breathing difficulties and has been told not to travel until cleared by his doctors, his editorial assistant said Thursday.
/ Source: The Associated Press

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer spent the Labor Day weekend in a hospital with breathing difficulties and has been told not to travel until cleared by his doctors, his editorial assistant said Thursday.

Mailer, 84, has adult onset asthma and was experiencing “labored” breathing, Dwayne Raymond Prickett said. He spent five days in a Boston hospital undergoing tests.

Prickett declined to say when Mailer was released or name the hospital where he was treated.

Mailer has since returned to his Provincetown home, is doing well and is preparing for his daughter’s upcoming wedding, Prickett said.

“There’s not really any need for alarm,” he said.

Mailer was scheduled to deliver public readings at the University of South Carolina on Sept. 25, and at the University of South Florida on Sept. 27, but those events were canceled, Prickett said.

Mailer gained fame in 1948 for his debut novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” based on his experiences as an infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II.

He won his first Pulitzer in 1969 for “Armies of the Night”, a nonfiction book about the anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon. He won the prize again in 1980 for “The Executioner’s Song,” about the life and execution of Utah murderer Gary Gilmore.