American · b. 1923
Norman Mailer was a major and combustible figure in American letters, a two-time Pulitzer winner and pioneer of literary nonfiction, author of The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner's Song.
Norman Mailer burst onto the scene with The Naked and the Dead (1948), a powerful World War II novel written in his twenties, and spent the next half-century as one of America’s most ambitious, pugnacious, and controversial writers.
A pioneer of the “New Journalism” and literary nonfiction, he won Pulitzer Prizes for The Armies of the Night, about an antiwar march, and The Executioner’s Song, a monumental nonfiction account of the killer Gary Gilmore. He also co-founded The Village Voice and remained a provocative public presence throughout his life.
Mailer is remembered as a giant and a lightning rod of postwar American literature, whose ambition and energy reshaped both the novel and reportage.
by Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer's monumental debut, drawn from his service in the Pacific. Following an army platoon during the invasion of a Japanese-held island, the novel renders the brutality, boredom, and power struggles of war while probing the authoritarian impulses lurking within the American character.
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