The Deer Park (First Edition)

MAILER, Norman. The Deer Park. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1955.

Octavo. Original black publisher's cloth. Lettering to cover and spine in green. Original unclipped dust jacket. [viii], 375 pp. First edition, first printing.

Few American novels of the twentieth century arrived with a publication history as fraught as The Deer Park. Norman Mailer (1923–2007) had written the novel under contract to Rinehart & Company, his publisher since the enormous success of The Naked and the Dead in 1948, and Rinehart had already set the book in type when its head, Stanley Rinehart, abruptly withdrew, objecting to six lines in which the sexual relations between an ageing producer and a young call girl are implied rather than described. The lines contained no obscene language whatsoever — a fact several of Mailer's contemporaries found darkly comic, given the considerably more explicit material Mailer would go on to publish in later decades without incident. Mailer refused to cut them. Rinehart rejected the manuscript outright, and Mailer's cousin and attorney, Charles Rembar — who would go on to become one of the most significant First Amendment litigators of the century, later defending Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer — threatened suit, ultimately securing a settlement that allowed Mailer to keep his advance and shop the manuscript elsewhere.

What followed was a genuine ordeal: the novel was rejected by six further publishers in the space of ten weeks, each declining for reasons of purported obscenity that amounted, in every case, to the same six disputed lines. It was finally accepted, entirely without revision, by G. P. Putnam's Sons under publisher Walter Minton — who, according to Mailer, welcomed the controversy the rejections had generated rather than being deterred by it. Mailer used the delay to undertake a thorough revision of the novel's narrative voice, strengthening the first-person perspective of his narrator, Sergius O'Shaughnessy, in ways he later credited as a genuine turning point in his development as a writer. The novel was published in 1955 substantially as Putnam had received it, six contested lines intact.

The Deer Park draws on Mailer's own brief and disillusioning stint as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1949–50, and is set in the fictional desert resort town of Desert D'Or — a lightly veiled Palm Springs — where the film industry's leading figures converge to relax, indulge, and quietly destroy one another. The narrative follows Sergius O'Shaughnessy, a recently discharged Air Force pilot and aspiring writer, as he observes and is drawn into the moral collapse of Charles Eitel, a blacklisted film director whose failure to withstand the pressures of the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee becomes the novel's central tragedy. The title itself refers to the Parc-aux-Cerfs, the eighteenth-century pleasure retreat established for Louis XV — "that gorge of innocence and virtue," as Mailer's epigraph has it, "in which were engulfed so many victims who when they returned to society brought with them depravity, debauchery and all the vices."

Critical reception on publication was mixed, but the novel made the bestseller list and sold more than 50,000 copies in its first year — a commercial vindication of the seven publishers who had declined it. It is now regarded by a number of critics as the finest Hollywood novel written since Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, and Mailer's own later account of its tortured path to publication, "The Mind of an Outlaw," published in Esquire in 1959 and reprinted in Advertisements for Myself, remains one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of mid-century American literary censorship ever written by the author himself. Mailer later adapted the novel for the stage, and The Deer Park: A Play opened Off-Broadway in Greenwich Village in January 1967, starring Rip Torn and Mailer's own third wife, Beverly Bentley.

Very good in good dust jacket. Dust jacket unclipped, wearing and small loss at spine and fold-in creases. Some markings to front cover, one previous repair made with tape to upper edge at spine. Hardcover boards very good, binding square and tight. Some minor markings on front and back faces, slight wearing along edges and extremities. Contents very good, with some toning along edges.

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Catalogue Number: 1110002809415