Books I Have Liked
Mailer's contribution to a New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review preference poll of forty well-known writers — he lists Kafka's The Castle, Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt, and Forster's Howards End.
“Books I Have Liked.” Preference poll of 40 well-known writers concerning their recent reading. New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, 5 December 1948.
Mailer lists three books: The Castle by Franz Kafka; Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser; and Howards End by E.M. Forster. Seven of the 40 polled — Bartley Crum, James Hilton, Richard Lauterbach, Sinclair Lewis, Richard Match, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Irwin Shaw — named The Naked and the Dead.
The larger reception context of 48.13 — Sinclair Lewis’s widely reprinted “greatest writer to come out of his generation” remark, the year-end top-ten lists, and the Life magazine attack — is summarized in the Reception section of the NAD Work page.