The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author [Paperback]

Fiftieth anniversary edition with a new introduction created especially for the occasion by Norman Mailer

Visceral and gripping,The Naked and the Deadisan essential work from one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century.

Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War,The Nakedand the Deadreceived unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon.

Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948,The Naked and the Deadis representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing.

Norman Mailer's first novel,The Naked and the Dead,is widely regarded as one of the finest American novels of the twentieth century. Among Norman Mailer's other achievements areWhy Are We in Vietnam?,The Armies of the Night, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1968, andThe Executioner's Song, which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize.

The best novel to come out of the . . . war, perhaps the best book to come out of any war.
San Francisco Chronicle

Best novel yet about World War II.
Time

Brutal, agonizing, astonishingly thoughtful.
Newsweek

Nightmarish masterpiece of realism.
Cleveland News

Vibrant with life, abundant with real people, full of memorable scenes. To call it merely a great book about the war would be to minimize its total achievement.
The Philadelphia Inquirer

The most important American novel sinceMoby-Dick.
Providence Journal