Complex magazine has what might be my favorite of the Mailer tributes coming out this week: a post about his book The Faith of Graffiti. It turns out Mailer become obsessed with graffiti back in 1974, back when "wild style" referred to leopard-print sheets. Says the Complex blog:

[The book] was an oversized masterpiece with photos by Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar detailing the mysterious emerging art form on NYC’s subway trains. The notoriously tough guy author intellectualized the graffiti movement in its early beginnings—’Faith’ was published in 1974—when hand styles were still being developed and most of the letters were very primitive. Mailer was fascinated by the art form, writing, “What a quintessential marriage of cool and style to write your name in giant separate living letters, large as animals, lythe as snakes, mysterious as Arabic and Chinese curls of alphabet.”