Twenty-five-year-old Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and
the Dead, is published on this day in 1948. The book is
critically acclaimed and widely considered one of the best
novels to come out of World War II. Mailer was born in New
Jersey in 1923 and raised in Brooklyn. He attended Harvard and
joined the Army during World War II. After leaving the Army in
1946, he studied at the Sorbonne, where he wrote the Naked and
The Dead, based on his own military experiences. The book, which
closely chronicles the lives of 13 soldiers stationed in the
Pacific, presents a fictional story with precise, journalistic
detail. Mailer's next two books, Barbaray Shore (1951) and The
Deer Park (1955), were savaged by critics, but his subsequent
journalistic chronicles fared better. The Armies of the Night
(1968), an account of his participation in the Washington peace
march of 1967, won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the
National Book Award in 1969. His novel The Executioner's Song, a
fictionalized account of the life