We were just about to lean into a nice Sunday morning, working on our NaNoWriMo effort, when we opened the New York Times Web site just to see if any disaster had befallen us overnight that may take precedence over our literary venture. What we saw, buried toward the end of the day's headlines, was this:

"Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Is Dead."

We gasped, choked, looked around the empty basement of Stumptown Coffee, where we're the only one sitting, staring at our laptop. You've got to be kidding us. Men like Mailer don't die, the ascend, right?

We found Mailer through The Executioner's Song, and later read one of his glorious journalistic pieces about boxing, The Fight, wherein he followed Muhammad Ali to Africa for his highly publicized and extremely historic fight against George Foreman.

As a budding young novelist, it's impossible to not look up to giants like Mailer, whose mission in life seemed to be as much to live the Great American Novel as to compose it. He was, as most great novelists are, a complete asshole at several points in his life. We should hate him simply for his stand against women's liberation, but doing so would mean eschewing his exceptional, provocative use of language, a gift matched by friend/foe Gore Vidal, and few others.

The man to whom the similarly gifted Vidal once referred as "the force," wrote 30 novels in his life, two of which won Pulitzers. He helped found The Village Voice, obsessed about boxing, and boasted an ego the size of the entire New York metro area. And now, quite unliterarily, he's dead of renal failure.

(If you're not hugely familiar with Mailer's work, the piece in the New York Times is worth a read.)