Norman Mailer is five feet, eight and one half inches tall, weighs 140 pounds, is twenty-five years old and has $40,000. He ran up this bank account writing a book called “The Naked and the Dead” which is expected to sell over 100,000 copies this year, and nobody knows how many more in the years to come. The book, Mr. Mailer’s first, is a big, tough, cynical, startling novel about the war which has been acclaimed, not only as a tremendous first novel and a startling product for a twenty-five-year old, but as one of the best books to come out of World War II — comparable to Dos Passos’, Hemingway’s and Remarque’s World War I novels.
Of his sudden success, small, dark, earnest Norman Mailer who was born in Brooklyn, has been a soda jerk, a Harvard student, and a soldier, says with some bewilderment, “It gives you a fantastic security. If I keep on living in the manner to which I’ve been accustomed, the money would probably last for fifteen or twenty years. If I live according to my present scale, it would last a day and a half.” Besides the book rights, Mr. Mailer will also profit from an adaptation which Lillian Hellman (distinguished author of such titans of the theatre as “The Children’s Hour,” “The Little Foxes,” “Watch On the Rhine,” “Another Part of the Forest”) is preparing for the stage. It is scheduled to appear in February.