France gives Legion of Honor to Mailer for literary works

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer received France's most prestigious award, the Legion of Honor.

H.E. Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador to the United States, presented the medal to Mailer on behalf of President Jacques Chirac at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York during a Friday evening ceremony.

"Norman Mailer is an American hero with a fierce love of freedom and an intellectual who has taken a stand in all the great struggles of his time," Levitte said in a statement.

Mailer, 83, won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Armies of the Night" in 1969 and again in 1980 for "The Executioner's Song."