Harold Pinter has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Cool. With every year that passes, however, I find myself asking one question: What about Mailer? The question has become even more urgent over the past couple of years. I began reading Norman Mailer when I was in my early teens, and always took him for granted. It's only recently that I've begun to realize how unique the guy was—a great novelist of powerful language and ideas who was also a public intellectual, a journalist, a critic, a rabble-rouser, and a bully. There's nobody else like Mailer in America today, and even worldwide, only Arundhati Roy comes immediately to mind—and Roy seems to have given up fiction for good. Yes, Mailer was profoundly self-destructive, and yes, he stabbed his wife and chewed off Rip Torn's ear, but unlike other self-destructive writers, he never totally imploded, and managed to remain a major force in letters for sixty-five consecutive years. That's awe-inspiring.

There seems to be a lot of nostalgia for the dead breed of the supercritic, as witnessed by the recent outpouring of material on Edmund Wilson. Mailer, in many ways, was—and is—more extraordinary. Awarding him the Nobel Prize would highlight his amazing career, and bring attention to the fact that writers like Mailer have ceased to exist, right when the world needs them most. We need more monsters like this guy.