'Probably no one has written better about boxing than Mailer has' Guardian '"If ever a fighter had been able to demonstrate that boxing was a twentieth-century art, it must be Ali," says Norm, and his achievement in this masterly book is of a similar order, demonstrating that writing about sport can also be a twentieth-century art' - Geoff Dyer, New Statesman

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and went to Harvard when he was sixteen. He majored in engineering, but it was while he was at university that he became interested in writing; he published his first story when he was eighteen. He was winner of the National Book Award for Arts and Letters in 1969 and of the Pulitzer Prize twice, once in 1969 and again in 1980. Norman Mailer was married six times and had nine children. He died in November 2007.