The Naked and the Dead & Selected Letters 1945–1946
The Library of America's centenary-year volume pairing the full text of The Naked and the Dead (1948) with a selection of Mailer's letters from 1945–1946, edited by J. Michael Lennon. Issued seventy-five years after the novel's first publication.
Published 20 August 2023, in the centenary year of Mailer’s birth, The Naked and the Dead & Selected Letters 1945–1946 is the Library of America‘s second Mailer volume, edited by J. Michael Lennon. It reprints the full text of The Naked and the Dead — seventy-five years after its 1948 first edition — and pairs it with a selection of the letters Mailer wrote in 1945 and 1946, the years of his Pacific service and the novel’s composition. The juxtaposition lets the reader watch the war novel take shape against the soldier’s own correspondence home (ISBN 978-1-59853-743-7; 844 pp.).
The volume follows the Library of America’s 2018 two-volume gathering of Mailer’s 1960s work (Four Books of the 1960s and Collected Essays of the 1960s), continuing the canon-making project of admitting Mailer’s writing to the series.