THE lifelong correspondence of Norman Mailer has been made public, revealing the flirtations, friendships and feuds of one of 20th century literature’s outstanding pugilists.

The archive contains letters to and from about 3,500 names including Madonna, Bill Clinton, Lord Bragg and Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy.

Mailer, who died aged 84 in November, lived too much of his life in public for there to be major surprises in the archive. But it does provide intriguing insights into a character often obscured by bombast.

Woody Allen once quipped that Mailer’s ego was so massive that he had “donated” it to Harvard for medical research. Yet Mailer was not too proud to accept as a compliment Madonna’s thanks to him for not misquoting her in a journalistic profile.

“Thank you for being so brave,” she wrote in 1994, cheerily signing off “Love Madonna”. Mailer replied flirtatiously: “You deserve every good thing I said about you . . . Cheers, amities, Norman.”

He was similarly honey-toned in his dealings with Clint East-wood, who wrote to say that he normally hated reading about himself but had liked the version Mailer showed in a profile. Mailer wrote back to “Dear Clint”, purring: “Listen, it wasn’t that hard to write - all I had to do was tell the truth. It’s the phoney pieces that throw out the literary back.”

He confessed irritation with being thought of as the best journalist in America - he thought himself the best writer. That view was disputed by feminists on both sides of the Atlantic who objected to his personal life (he had six wives, nine children and numerous affairs) as well as his writing.

The broadcaster and novelist Lord (Melvyn) Bragg was a cheer-leader for him in Britain, and wrote to him about his disdain for “the body of critics over here who have reverted yet again to the sad little Englishness of ‘let’s cut the big American down to size’ ”.

True to form, Mailer’s final British accolade was the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex award, awarded posthumously for a passage in his most recent book, The Castle in the Forest.

In his correspondence with Hefner, Mailer recalled good times at the Playboy mansion in Chicago, writing in 1962 with relish that it was “as exciting as hell”. Hefner says euphemistically: “I hope you enjoyed yourself, I think you must have because you kept the party going all week.”

There are numerous playful letters to Jackie Kennedy and Diane Arbus, the photographer; the novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Iris Murdoch; and the journalists Barbara Amiel and Tina Brown. Mailer endorsed Brown’s application for a green card in glowing terms but added: “Don’t believe a word of this. You are too attractive ever to let your head swell.”

However, he remained best known for his trenchant views on everything from Vietnam to the conflict in Iraq. Relations with male literary rivals were frequently strained: John Updike felt it necessary to tell him that he had not accused him of being trashy, and that he thought he was “a model of energy and courage”.

After he resorted to punching Gore Vidal (a long-standing foe), Vidal sniffed: “As usual, words failed him.” Truman Capote wrote that it was a shame Mailer had not killed him.

The warmth of other exchanges between Capote and Mailer is surprising as Mailer was often accused of being not just violently sexist but also rampantly homophobic.

Born in 1923 to a well-known New Jersey family and educated at Harvard, Mailer made his name writing about his experiences in the second world war in The Naked and the Dead (1948).

He loathed using the phone and said he sometimes ignored even his oldest friends when they called. That habit partly explains the volume of correspondence, collated by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Another reason is that his mother, convinced he was a genius, kept everything he wrote as a child and a teenager.

Times Recommends

• Times Charity Appeal: SolarAid
• Is it Black Monday all over again for Dubai?
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal