The Naked and the Dead (First UK Edition)

MAILER, Norman. The Naked and the Dead. London: Allan Wingate, 1949.

Octavo. Original black publisher's cloth. Lettering to spine in gilt. Original unclipped dust jacket. [viii], 721 pp. First UK edition, first printing.

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) was twenty-five years old, fresh from Harvard and freshly demobilised from wartime service with the 112th Cavalry Regiment in the Philippines campaign, when he wrote The Naked and the Dead while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Published in the United States by Rinehart & Company in May 1948, it became one of the most sensational literary debuts of the twentieth century: an instant bestseller that sold nearly 200,000 copies in its first year and held the top position on the New York Times bestseller list for eleven consecutive weeks, propelling its young author to a level of fame he had, by his own later admission, actively sought. This first UK edition, published the following year by Allan Wingate — while the firm was still under the direction of André Deutsch, before Deutsch struck out to found his own eponymous imprint — carries dramatically different jacket artwork from its American counterpart and is considered independently collectible in its own right.

The novel follows a fourteen-man American infantry platoon fighting to take the fictional Japanese-held island of Anopopei in the Pacific theatre, and it announced, from its opening pages, a new kind of American war fiction: one written with an almost forensic, journalistic attention to the physical and psychological texture of combat, and one considerably more interested in the internal weather of fear, exhaustion, boredom, and petty human cruelty than in heroism. Mailer moves between the platoon's grinding campaign and extended flashback sequences illuminating each soldier's civilian life, building a novel that operates simultaneously as harrowing combat narrative and as a wider parable about power, class, and the machinery of institutional authority — embodied above all in the chess match of wills between the coldly Machiavellian General Cummings and the brutal, driven Sergeant Croft. Mailer himself described the book, beneath its surface realism, as fundamentally a political novel and a warning about the encroachment of totalitarian habits of mind on American life.

The novel's frank language attracted controversy from the outset. Mailer's publishers refused to print the profanity in which soldiers of his acquaintance had actually spoken, forcing him to substitute the euphemism "fug" throughout — the origin of the apocryphal, oft-repeated line attributed to Tallulah Bankhead: "So you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck.'" In Britain, the book's language and content came under formal scrutiny: the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, was asked in Parliament to consider prosecution under the Obscene Publications Acts, and though he ultimately declined — finding the novel, "whilst tedious and foul in parts, [unlikely] to corrupt or deprave" — the episode is itself a measure of how forcefully the book had registered on the British literary and political establishment on its arrival.

The Naked and the Dead is now widely regarded as one of the finest and most influential novels to emerge from the Second World War, ranked 51st on the Modern Library's list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. It established Mailer, at twenty-five, as the most celebrated literary voice of his generation, and set him on the path toward the extraordinary and often turbulent career that followed — a career that would eventually yield two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song (1979), and that would establish Mailer as one of the most significant, provocative, and closely watched figures in American letters for the remainder of the twentieth century.

Near fine in near fine dust jacket. Dust jacket unclipped, with minor weathering along edges and extremities; colours bright. Hardcover boards in near fine condition, binding square and tight. Very minor weathering along edges; a single small marking to rear board. Contents near fine, with very minor foxing and age markings to endpapers, and some small rubbing to the bottom corner of the text block.

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