Norman Mailer

Kurt Vonnegut, 84, April 11: The master novelist, who wrote "Cat's Cradle," "Slaughterhouse-Five" and other landmark works of fiction and science fiction, helped shape American literature in the second half of the 20th century. His wife, photographer Jill Krementz, said Vonnegut... more had suffered head injuries in a fall not long before he died. Upon his death, Norman Mailer called Vonnegut "a marvelous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own. ... I would salute him our own Mark Twain." (Frank Herman/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.)