Norman Mailer: Works and Days

1948

Mailer publishes The Naked and the Dead on 6 May and becomes a literary sensation at twenty-five; studies at the Sorbonne under the GI Bill; returns from France in July to meet with Lillian Hellman about a stage adaptation and to campaign for Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace.

Norman Mailer, 1948

Winter and spring

Norman and Bea Silverman Mailer are in Paris, having sailed for Europe on RMS Queen Elizabeth in October 1947. Both are studying French language and culture at the Sorbonne under the GI Bill. In Paris, Mailer continues work on Barbary Shore (begun late 1947) and befriends Jean Malaquais, who will become a lifelong friend and mentor on Marxism and the Russian Revolution.

March

March — Advance excerpt from The Naked and the Dead appears as “The Naked and the Dead” (48.1) in Cross-Section: A Collection of New American Writing, ed. Edwin Seaver (New York: Simon and Schuster) — Mailer’s first book appearance.

May

May 6 — Publication of The Naked and the Dead by Rinehart (721 pages, $4.00). The novel reaches the top of the New York Times bestseller list for eleven consecutive weeks and remains on the list for a total of sixty-one weeks; it is nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the Gutenberg Award.

May 8 — Saturday Review gives Mailer his first magazine cover story, paired with Maxwell Geismar’s laudatory review and with “The Author” (48.3), an article-interview by “R.G.”.

Sources disagree on the novel’s publication date: Lennon’s Works and Days (PDF, 48.2) and Lennon’s Days RTF both give 6 May; the ProjectMailer.net Important Dates page gives 8 May. This project follows the Lennon primary. See the NAD Work page for details.

Summer

July — Essay “Life-View” (48.4) appears in Book Find News; The Naked and the Dead is a Book Find Club selection.

July 21 — Mailer returns from France to New York. He meets with Lillian Hellman, who is interested in adapting NAD into a play, and begins campaigning for Henry A. Wallace‘s Progressive Party presidential campaign. Over the summer and fall, Mailer will deliver some thirty speeches on Wallace’s behalf in New York and California.

August

August 15 — Article-interview “People Who Read and Write” (48.5) in the New York Times Book Review.

August 21 — Horace Sutton’s article-interview “Wonder Boy Novelist” (48.6) appears in Cue.

August 22 — Louise Levitas’s long article-interview “The Naked Are Fanatics and the Dead Don’t Care” (48.7) appears in the New York Star — Mailer’s longest published interview until 1955, covering his Army experience as the source for NAD and his concern about “growing hysteria” over a war with Russia.

October

October — Mailer is the subject of an entry in Current Biography 1948 (48.8), edited by Anna Rothe — his first appearance in a standard reference work.

October 8 — “Do Professors Have Rights?” (48.9) in the New York Post — on an Indiana professor dismissed for his association with Wallace.

October 11 — Mailer speaks at a National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions rally in New York alongside W.E.B. DuBois and Harlow Shapley, on the preservation of political freedom in education. His remark — “It is a truism that fascism cannot come to America if our colleges and universities remain free” — is quoted in “Political Freedom for Teachers Urged” (48.10), an unsigned report in the New York Times. An advertisement for the event listed Mailer first among the announced speakers, followed by F.O. Matthiessen, Shirley Graham, Louis Untermeyer, Howard Fast, and Philip Van Doren.

October 18 — Essay “A Credo for the Living” (48.11) in the National Guardian, on postwar Europe, anti-Russian hysteria in the U.S., and the 1948 Wallace campaign — later reprinted in Mind of an Outlaw.

October 23 — Unsigned New Yorker profile “Rugged Times” (48.12), written by Lillian Ross; the interview marks the beginning of Mailer’s lifelong friendship with Ross.

December

December 5 — Mailer contributes three titles — Kafka’s The Castle, Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, Forster’s Howards End — to the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review’s preference poll “Books I Have Liked” (48.13). Seven of the forty respondents name The Naked and the Dead among their recent reading; Sinclair Lewis’s widely reprinted “greatest writer to come out of his generation” praise (given to Sylvia B. Richmond, Chelsea [Mass.] Record, 2 October) is carried on Mailer’s advertising for years.

December 13 — Newsweek names NAD one of the four best books of 1948, with Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, and Greene’s The Heart of the Matter.

December 31 — The Associated Press names Mailer “Man of the Year” in Literature, reported in the Asbury Park Evening News.

Reception context

The year’s praise is accompanied by what Lennon calls “a harbinger of 50 years of preponderantly negative reviews from the Time-Life organization” — a full-page Life editorial (16 August) attacks NAD for “slumming” and for nihilism about American domestic life. A later Life editorial (16 April 1951) will call the book “insidious slime”.

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Last updated: 2026-04-21