American literary giant Norman Mailer succumbed to acute renal failure on Saturday, passing away at the age of 84.

A fixture on bestseller shelves since debuting in 1948 with The Naked and the Dead, Mr. Mailer spent his six decades in the limelight doing essentially whatever he pleased -- he published more than 30 books, won the Pulitzer twice, helped found The Village Voice, and was one of the first (and most successful) authors to parlay his literary standing into wider celebrity.

If you've never heard of him, get yourself to a book store already. If you've read and loved his work, you'll appreciate this excerpt from The New York Times' four-page obituary:

If some of his books, written quickly and under financial pressure, were not as good as he had hoped, none of them were forgettable or without his distinctive stamp. And if he never quite succeeded in bringing off what he called "the big one" - the Great American Novel - it was not for want of trying.

Along the way, he transformed American journalism by introducing to nonfiction writing some of the techniques of the novelist and by placing at the center of his reporting a brilliant, flawed and larger-than-life character who was none other than Norman Mailer himself.

Source: The New York Times