Sarkozy leads tributes to Mailer

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has led the tributes to US author Norman Mailer, who died on Saturday.

"It is a giant of American literature who has disappeared," Mr Sarkozy said.

Mailer, who won the Pulitzer Prize twice for The Armies of the Night in 1968 and The Executioner's Song in 1979, died of renal failure aged 84.

He was known for biting prose and as an antagonist of the feminist movement. His latest work, The Castle in the Forest, was published this year.

Last month he had surgery to remove scar tissue from around his lung.

The president of Mailer's publisher, Random House, said he was "more than... one of the greatest writers of our time".

"He was a consummate professional, who stimulated us with his passion and ideas and charmed us with his wit and warmth," said Gina Centrello.

Author Gore Vidal described Mailer as "interesting, because he was interested".

"I went... a year or two ago... and stayed with him. He was in good form. We both dislike the same things about our native land so we had lots to talk about," Vidal said.

Writer EL Doctorow said Mailer was "the great chronicler of his time".

"His vaunted life as a public figure may have actually impeded serious critical attention to much of his work. Presumably, it will be possible now," he said.

Born in 1923 in New Jersey, Mailer wrote dozens of books as well as plays, poems, screenplays and essays.

His strong views on US political life, and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, provoked and enraged readers.

'Intellectual bully'

Mailer's first major success, the 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead, was a fictionalised account based on his experiences in the Army in World War II.

"A man who went to a famous prep school in the early 1920s said afterward, 'It was the worst experience of my life and the most valuable.' I can say the same about my time in the US Army," he reflected in 2005.

Mailer's works were often filled with violence, sexual obsession and views that angered feminists.

Married six times and the father of nine children, Mailer once said he was worried women were "going to take over the world".

Detractors considered him an intellectual bully and he feuded with fellow authors including Truman Capote, William Styron, Tom Wolfe and Norman Podhoretz.

In later life he reconsidered many of his old positions but never surrendered his right to speak his mind.

Mailer was also co-founder of The Village Voice alternative newspaper in New York.