The Naked and the Dead

Norman Mailer

1948

The old man Moshe Sefardnick sits in the rear of the place on a camp stool. There is never any work for him to do and indeed he is too old for it, too bewildered. The old man has never been able to understand America. It is too large, too fast, the ordered suppressed castes of centuries wither here; people are always in flux. His neighbors become…

Please login or register for free access to Posen Library
Register
Already have an account?
Engage with this Source

Creator Bio

Norman Mailer

1923–2007

Born in New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, Norman Mailer burst onto the literary scene with The Naked and the Dead, considered one of the best war novels ever written. Based on his brief army experience in the Philippines, the novel won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize and propelled Mailer to a level of fame at which he brashly remained for the next sixty years. Painstaking and exact in his writing, most of Mailer’s books took years to write. His powerful evocation of executed murderer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song garnered him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1980. Prolific in all aspects, including political activism, he left behind forty-five thousand letters when he died.

You may also like

The East Africa Offer

But would not the existence of a Jewish State, or the efforts to establish it, bring into suspicion the Jews’ patriotism in other countries, or even cause them to be driven to the new State? No more…
View Source

Yitskhok Leybush Peretz

And you’re dead. And you’ve not yet been covered by the ground; Far through a thousand streets like horses galloping round, Young and old newsboys spread, rushing about their business, Hawking papers…
View Source