The author, who died of renal failure at age 84 on Nov. 10, made his first major impression with the WWII novel "The Naked and The Dead" in 1948. He wrote more than 40 works with diverse styles and themes and won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for 1968's "The Armies of the Night" and 1979's "The Executioner's Song."
Mailer won the 15th annual Bad Sex in Fiction prize for his most recent book, "The Castle in the Forest," which was published this year. The passage that won Mailer the prize depicted Adolf Hitler's parents having sex, and referred to a flaccid penis as being "as soft as a coil of excrement."
"It was the excrement that tipped the balance," Philip Womack, assistant editor of the Literary Review — whose editorial staff judges the annual prize — said. "That, and the line about Alois [the male character] being 'ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.' That was pretty awful."
Previous winners of the dubious prize, first awarded in 1993 by the Literary Review, include Salman Rushdie, A.A. Gill and Melvyn Bragg.
It was originally created to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel and to discourage it."
"We are sure that he would have taken the prize in good humor," the judges said of Mailer, whom they described as a "great American man of letters."
The panel commended the "variety of [Mailer's] work, his innovative journalism, his combative spirit and his love of life."
It is the first time the award has been given posthumously.
