American novelist whose larger-than-life persona often overshadowed his writing. In a career that spanned six decades, his first book, the widely-acclaimed World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead is considered his best. A keen observer of culture, his later novels fail to measure up to his early potential. However, he won both a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for The Armies of the Night and another Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song.