Happy Centenary Birthday ~ Norman Mailer
Happy Centenary birthday to American novelist Norman Mailer. To commemorate what would be the 100th anniversary of his birth, January, 31st, the Library of America will reissue his famous novel "The Naked and the Dead". In a recent New Yorker article "Flesh Wound" David Denby examines Mailer's life and career and poses the question: "Norman Mailer went to war and wrote a big novel about it. Did he ever come back?" Mailer's service in the Second World War transformed him from a diminutive 'Jewish, middle class Brooklynite' before he enlisted into "a barrel-chested macho- a man six times married, the father of eight children and an adopted son, and the author of more than forty books, some of them American classics." Upon his return from war he wrote "The Naked and the Dead", which quickly became an American classic. The text offered a very candid and brutally real picture of war and made him an overnight liter