As you say in your obituary of Norman Mailer, he got every book prize going except the Nobel (November 17, 2007). Which is one of the reasons why the Nobel Prize still means something, you should have pointed out at least in passing. Forever after the Great American Novel long after the novel had lost its meaning as an art form, Mailer had little to offer but shrill bluster. Shoddy hope. And pointless jinks galore. Together with his great hero, Hemingway, whom he desperately trailed from start to finish, Mailer was a writer of note only because America was a country to be reckoned with in his prime. Everywhere else, he would have been a pugilist without a true punch, a wit without much to say, and a tottering drunk out of breath. A couple of generations before or after, he would have been left without a single book prize, too. An obituary worth reading would at least hint at all this, if not much more. Sadly, yours is even less pugnacious than Mailer at his most limp. A missed opportunity, if there has ever been one.