Mailer, Norman
Mailer, Norman( 1923– ),born in New Jersey, reared in Brooklyn, began writing fiction before graduation from Harvard (1943). After serving with the army in the Pacific he wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948), a realistic and naturalistic novel of the fates of 13 men in an infantry platoon who survive the invasion of a Japanese-held island. Both a popular and a critical success, it was followed by two novels in which he turned from naturalistic to existential and allegorical views and which were far less well received: Barbary Shore (1951), a symbolic treatment of the conflict between leftist and rightist political forces in the U.S., and The Deer Park (1955, dramatized 1967), a bitter view of Hollywood as representative of the entire nation, seen through the stories of three men, a film director whose desire to create honest pictures is threatened by the rightist House Committee on Un-American Activities, an air force veteran...
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