Yep, even writers snap sometimes! On one side of the ring, we had Normal Mailer; an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor, and political candidates known best for his Pultizer Prize winning book The Executioner’s Song. On the other, there was Gore Vidal, also an American writer and essayist, best known for his witty aphorisms (you’ll see why soon).
Mailers previous opponents included his second wife, whom he stabbed, Tom Wolfe, critic Michiko Katutani, Truman Capote, and Germaine Greer. He added Vidal to his list of enemies when Vidal compared Mailer’s “The Prisoner of Sex” to “three days of menstrual flow.”
To rebut that, Mailer head butted him in the green room at the Dick Cavett Show in 1971. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal and punched him. Even when he was lying on the floor, injured, Vidal managed to pull out one of those “witty aphorisms” for which he is known; “As usual, words fail him,” he sniffed.