A big personality deserves a big book, and J Michael Lennon's biography of American writer Norman Mailer is a 947-page doorstop.
Even more than Hemingway, Mailer personified the writer as action man.
By the age of 25 he had both a war and a best-selling novel - The Naked and the Dead - under his belt. In fact, Mailer tailored his war in the Pacific so that it would make for a better book.
But then, Mailer always lived life to the full. He was an intellectual and pugilist, a writer and journalist, a family man and philanderer (six wives and nine children).
He was vain and combative, took copious amounts of drink and drugs, and fell out with virtually every famous writer of his generation. Not only did he champion murderers, he was arrested for stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales (she didn't press charges). Oh yes, and he ran for mayor of New York.
In between all this (not to mention his anti-war activism and relentless self-promotion), he wrote 12 novels and much memorable journalism.
No one could accuse Norman Mailer of not having packed enough into his 84 years.
It started out quietly enough in Long Branch, New Jersey, where Mailer was born in 1923 to Jewish immigrants who were quick to recognise his talent and stroke his ego. By the age of 16 he was at Harvard.
From then on it was a life crammed with incident. Lennon, who knew Mailer for 35 years, has made the most of the access he had to Mailer's wives, children and unpublished and papers. The result is more than hagiography: it is an exhaustive and nuanced portrait of a man who refused to be ignored.
*Norman Mailer: A Double Life, by J Michael Lennon, is published by Simon & Schuster, RRP $45.
