NEW YORK (MCT) – Norman Mailer, the author whose name was synonymous with literary… NEW YORK (MCT) – Norman Mailer, the author whose name was synonymous with literary celebrity in the second half of the 20th century, died Saturday at the age of 84.

Mailer’s death represents “the loss of a literary giant who was 100 percent American,” Dick Cavett, speaking from his home in Montauk, N.Y., said.

Cavett presided over a legendary name-calling battle between Mailer and fellow writer Gore Vidal in 1971, on The Dick Cavett Show.

During the show, Mailer and Cavett also traded insults, but, Cavett said, “That was just show business.” They remained friends, and he remained a fan: “Some of his paragraphs just lift you out of your chair, he’s so good.”

We’ve lost “the last of the great World War II American writers,” said author James Brady (“The Coldest War,” “Why Marines Fight”), who knew Mailer 30 years and has a sketched self-portrait by Mailer on a wall in his East Hampton home. Mailer sent him the sketch as part of a four-page handwritten letter explaining why he couldn’t write a short blurb for one of Brady’s upcoming books because of eyestrain, Brady recalled with amusement. He also remembered an evening when Elaine Kaufman, the proprietor of the Manhattan literary watering hole Elaine’s, tossed Mailer out herself for being a “belligerent drunk. . . . They didn’t talk for two years.”

Brady added, “He will be missed. He was a character.”

Mailer won two Pulitzer Prizes, for “The Armies of the Night” in 1969 and “The Executioner’s Song” in 1980. He also won a National Book Award for “The Armies of the Night,” and in 2005, he was awarded a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, presenters of the National Book Awards. By Dan Cryer and Aileen Jacobson, Newsday

HOUSTON (MCT)-Just weeks after some 20,000 demonstrators protested what they decried as unequal justice aimed at six black teenagers in the Louisiana town of Jena, controversy is growing over the accounting and disbursing of at least $500,000 donated to pay for the teenagers’ legal defense.

Parents of the “Jena 6” teenagers have refused to publicly account for how they are spending a large portion of the cash, estimated at up to $250,000, that resides in a bank account they control.

Michael Baisden, a nationally syndicated black radio host who is leading a major fundraising drive on behalf of the Jena 6, has declined to reveal how much he has collected. Attorneys for the first defendant to go to trial, Mychal Bell, say they have yet to receive any money from him.

Meanwhile, photos and videos are circulating across the Internet that raise questions about how the donated funds are being spent. One photo shows Robert Bailey, one of the Jena 6 defendants, smiling and posing with $100 bills stuffed in his mouth. Another shows defendants Carwin Jones and Bryant Purvis modeling like rap stars on a red carpet at the Black Entertainment Television Hip Hop music awards in Atlanta last month.

The teenagers’ parents have strongly denied that they have misused any of the donated money. Bailey’s mother, for example, insisted that the $100 bills shown in the photograph were cash her son had earned as a park maintenance worker.

Only one national civil rights group, Color of Change, has fully disclosed how the $212,000 it collected for the Jena 6 via a massive Internet campaign has been distributed. The grass-roots group, which has nearly 400,000 members, has posted images of canceled checks and other signed documents on its Web site showing that all but $1,230 was paid out in October in roughly equal amounts to attorneys for the Jena youths. By Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune

MIAMI (MCT) – Florida twice put President Bush into the White House, but a new poll shows him hitting an all-time low among voters in the nation’s most populous swing state.

The survey shows that voters are troubled by Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, support withdrawing troops “as quickly as possible,” and are overwhelmingly convinced – 68 percent – that the country is on the wrong track.

Just 33 percent of the state’s registered voters rated Bush’s job performance “excellent” or “good,” and 50 percent called his handling of the situation in Iraq “poor,” according to the poll conducted for The Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post, the St. Petersburg Times and Bay News 9. The survey has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Voters, said Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, who conducted the poll along with Democrat Rob Schroth, “are in a very sour, pessimistic mood” when it comes to the nation’s fortunes.

Dampening the state’s spirits appears to be Iraq: More than one in four of those surveyed said that “managing the war in Iraq” was the most important issue for the president and Congress to resolve.

Controlling illegal immigration came in a distant second-but placed higher than the traditional hot-button issues of increasing access to healthcare and tackling terrorism. Other concerns trailed, including protecting Medicare and Social Security and lowering energy prices. By Lesley Clark and Breanne Gilpatrick, McClatchy Newspapers