By Lillian Ross. The New Yorker, 23 October 1948, p. 25.
We had a talk the other day with Norman Mailer, whose novel The Naked and the Dead has been at the top of the best-seller lists for several months now. We met him at Rinehart & Co., his publishers, in a conference room that had, along with other handy editorial equipment, a well-stocked bar. We’d heard rumors that Mailer was a rough-and-ready young man with a strong antipathy to literary gatherings and neckties, but on the occasion of our encounter he was neatly turned out in gray tweeds, with a striped red-and-white necktie and shined shoes, and he assured us that he doesn’t really have any deep-seated prejudices concerning dress. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got all the average middle-class fears.” He thinks the assumption that he hasn’t got them grew out of his meeting some of the literati last summer when he was wearing sneakers and an old T shirt. He’d just come from a ball game, and it was a very hot day. “I figured anybody with brains would be trying to keep cool,” he said.