- Fiction, Men and war, Soldiers, World War, 1939-1945
Based on Mailer’s own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, *The Naked and the Dead* is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of warfare. Focusing on the experiences of a fourteen-man platoon stationed on a Japanese-held island in the South Pacific during World War II, and written in a journalistic style, it tells the moving story of the soldiers' struggle to retain a sense of dignity amidst the horror of warfare, and to find a source of meaning in their lives amidst the sounds and fury of battle.
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Character
Grave, earnest, overwhelming and bleak.
- gravecomic
- earnestironic
- cooloverwhelming
- warmbleak
- classical in formformally daring
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About the book
- Author
- Norman Mailer
- First published
- 1948
- Pages
- 721
- Publisher
- Panther, Grafton, Picador
- Editions
- 31
- Language
- Russian, German, English
- ISBN
- 9780030677052
Where to read
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On Open Library, 12 have read it and 74 want to.
“NOBODY COULD sleep.”
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and film director. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of narrative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the essay onto the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letter
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