The battalion of combative, troubled and talented male writers who shaped American fiction after World War II lost its commander yesterday when Norman Mailer died at 84 in New York.

He had survived his contemporaries -- James Jones, William Styron, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud -- despite a reckless life that not only included drinking and womanizing, but also a pugnacious boxer's stance that invited verbal and physical attacks. Cause of death was kidney failure.

Mr. Mailer also out-wrote his contemporaries, producing three dozen books, starting with "The Naked and the Dead" in 1948, still considered one of the best novels to come out of the war.

"The history of American literature in the 20th and early 21st century would be both depleted and inaccurate, minus the inclusion of the work of Norman Mailer," novelist Toni Morrison said two years ago when Mr. Mailer was honored by the National Book Foundation.

"If one thinks of America as a charged field, Mailer is one of its tallest lightning rods."

Ms. Morrison also pinpointed the writer's faults, particularly his "obtuseness regarding women and race."

An African-American woman, Ms. Morrison represents the varied face of today's national literature. Mr. Mailer came from a different era and made few attempts to accommodate the present.

He cited the classics as his models -- Proust, Dostoyevsky, Joyce and Tolstoy:

"Whose comprehension of society is not more incisive after reading Proust? Who does not know more about language once James Joyce is encountered? Who says that compassion has not been deepened by living in Tolstoy's novels," he asked.

Mr. Mailer rejected most contemporary novels as "all too forgettable. The serious novel may soon be in danger of being adored with the same poignant concern we feel for endangered species. There is all but unspoken shame in the literary world today," he said in 2005.

Born Jan. 31, 1923 in New Jersey, Mr. Mailer served in the Army in the Pacific after graduating from Harvard University in 1943. Following the success of his first novel, he encountered critical and popular setbacks in the 1950s with two subsequent works of fiction, "Barbary Shore" and "The Deer Park."

Saved by nonfiction

Mr. Mailer turned to journalism, co-founding the Village Voice, a weekly, in 1955 and using its pages for his pungent and controversial essays, including what served him as his credo, "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster:"

"One is Hip or one is Square ... one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American nightlife or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed."

Mr. Mailer refused to conform.

The tepid response to his 1960s novels, "An American Dream" and "Why Are We In Vietnam?" saw him turn to nonfiction writing full-time.

A glimpse of Mr. Mailer's reporting talents surfaced in his coverage of the 1960 presidential campaign and his observations of then U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy in articles titled "Superman Comes to the Supermarket."

The books that he wrote in the late 1960s -- "The Armies of the Night," "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" and "Of A Fire on the Moon" -- earned him a prominent role as an outspoken critic of the nation's leaders and policies during a troubled period in the United States.

Yet, it grew increasingly difficult for Mr. Mailer to separate his own life from his books.

Appearing boozy at times, he invited confrontation and was arrested during the massive Vietnam War protest at the Pentagon in October 1967 that was the subject of the 1968 "Armies of the Night."

Referring to himself in the third person as a kind of character in his books, Mr. Mailer cultivated a public persona, on TV and elsewhere, of a "tough guy" intellectual who would just as soon punch out his critics as scornfully dismiss them.

Fueling this image was his messy and unsuccessful campaign to be mayor of New York City in 1969 as well as a contentious personal life with six wives and nine children.

In 1960, Mr. Mailer stabbed and seriously wounded his second wife, Adele Morales, after a drinking bout. He was jailed briefly, but she refused to press charges.

As the feminist movement grew in strength in the late 1960s, Mr. Mailer began a long-running feud with feminists, highlighted by his lengthy 1971 essay, "The Prisoner of Sex," that combined serious literary criticism with dismissals of attacks on male authors by Kate Millett and others.

His essay filled an entire issue of Harper's magazine and was later turned into a book.

Mr. Mailer also dabbled in film-making and play writing, yet it was his nonfiction writing that salvaged his dissolute, fading career.

Along with Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, Mr. Mailer brought the breadth, drama and personal aspects of fiction to American journalism in the early 1970s.

It was "The Executioner's Song" in 1977 that brilliantly blended reporting with fiction writing and showcased Mr. Mailer at his best.

Telling the story of the aimless drifter Gary Gilmore, executed in Utah in 1976 for murder, the book was the equal of Truman Capote's nonfiction masterpiece, "In Cold Blood." Mr. Mailer called it "a true life novel."

"My America is as real as almost all of the other Americas that readers and writers around the world have fashioned for themselves," he wrote in the foreword to a collection of his writings, "The Time of Our Time."

"There is no reason to believe the novelist is not better equipped to deal with the possibilities of a mysterious and difficult situation than anyone else," he continued, "since he or she is always trying to discover what the nature of reality might be."

The years that followed the Gilmore book were among the writer's most productive as he turned out a series of lengthy and serious novels including "Ancient Evenings" about ancient Egypt; "Tough Guys Don't Dance," his take on the detective story; and "Harlot's Ghost," a rumination on the Central Intelligence Agency that runs to more than 1,300 pages.

His nonfiction output proved to be spotty and more commercially inspired, particularly his biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Mr. Mailer mellowed in his old age, making his amends with the establishment and taking on the presidency of the PEN American Center, an organization that champions freedom of speech and protects the rights of writers.

"A Castle in the Forest," his version of the early life of Adolf Hitler, was his last novel, published earlier this year to lukewarm reviews.

"Writers are the marrow of the nation, its nutrient," Mr. Mailer said, and for nearly 50 years, he offered America's readers a bounty of images and ideas for their literary appetites.