Revisiting Norman Mailer’s ‘The Naked and the Dead’

About a decade after he had become famous for his bestselling first novel “The Naked and the Dead,” Norman Mailer reflected, with some mournfulness, on his vertiginous ascent: “My farewell to an average man’s experience was too abrupt; never again would I know, in the dreary way one usually knows such things, what it was like to work a dull job, or take orders from a man one hated. . . . I was prominent and empty, and I had to begin life again.”