Paris, France
Mailer and Bea Silverman lived in Paris from autumn 1947 through summer 1948 on the GI Bill, nominally as Mailer's Sorbonne year. The city was where Mailer met his "lifelong friend and mentor on Marxism and the Russian Revolution" Jean Malaquais, finished the galley corrections for The Naked and the Dead, and learned by transatlantic mail that the book had topped the New York Times bestseller list.
Mailer and Bea sailed for Europe in October 1947, settling in Paris so that Mailer could register at the Sorbonne under the GI Bill. In practice the year was spent writing, reading, and traveling: Mailer corrected galleys for NAD from Paris, and through the expatriate circle around Jean Malaquais — a Polish-French novelist who had been close to Trotsky, Gide, and Serge — was introduced to a post-Trotskyist Marxist milieu that would shape his politics through the 1950s.
In late winter and spring 1948 the advance reception of NAD began arriving by mail and cable. Mailer received news of the book’s instant bestseller status from Paris, and traveled on the continent — including Italy — before returning to the United States in July 1948 to meet with Lillian Hellman about a possible stage adaptation of the novel.
The “Paris year” would become one of the fixed reference points in Mailer’s later self-mythology: he would return to it often in interviews as the moment when he first understood himself as a European-trained radical as well as an American novelist. Mailer’s later trips to Paris (including the 1950s visits during his Malaquais collaborations) are noted in subsequent year pages as they come into scope.
Stub; to be expanded as later Paris-related Mailer material (1950s Malaquais collaborations, 1960s–1970s European trips, the reception of French translations) comes into scope.