The contemporary brief against Norman Mailer is long and sordid. He was a misogynist, a violent man who extolled violence. In his brawling and chest-thumping, he tried to out-Hemingway Hemingway and became a parody of Papa—a blowhard narcissist who provoked and offended like he breathed. For all his profuse writing (dozens of books, including two that won the Pulitzer, in a career that spanned six decades), what has lasted in the cultural memory is what he did with a penknife one night in 1960: He stabbed his second wife and the mother of two of his daughters, Adele Morales, just barely missing her heart. (She survived, and died in 2015 at 90 years old.)
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