The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Once it became obvious that The Naked and The Dead was going to be a best seller, and I would therefore receive that small fame which comes upon any young American who makes a great deal of money in a hurry, I remember that a depression set in on me. I was twenty-five, living in Paris with my first wife, Beatrice, and I had gone through a long leaky French winter in which I discovered once again that I knew very little and had everything still to learn. So I think I probably had been hoping The Naked and The Dead would have modest success, that everyone who read it would think it was extraordinary, but nonetheless the book would not change my life too much. I wished at the time to protect a modest condition. Many of my habits, even the character of my talent, depended on my humility – that word which has become part of the void in our time. I had had humility breathed into me by the war. After four serious years of taking myself seriously at Harvard, the army gave me but one lesson over and over again: when it came to taking care of myself, I had little to offer next to the practical sense of an illiterate sharecropper. Sometimes I think courage is the most exhaustible of virtues, and I used up a share of mine in getting through the war with my lip buttoned, since it took all of me to be at best a fair rifleman. No surprise then if I was a modest young man when it was all over. I knew I was not much better and I was conceivably a little less than most of the men I had come to know. At least a large part of me felt that way, and it was the part in command while I was writing The Naked and The Dead.

But once free of the army, I came back to some good luck. My first wife and I had saved some money during the war, and I did not have to work for a year. She believed in me and my family believed in me, and I was able to do my book. The Naked and The Dead flowed – I used to write twenty-five pages of first draft a week, and with a few weeks lost here and there, I was still able to write the novel and rewrite it in fifteen months. And I doubt if ever again I will have a book which is so easy to write. When once in a while I look at a page or two these days, I like its confidence – it seems to be at dead center –“Yes,” it is always saying, “this is about the way it is.”

Naturally, I was blasted a considerable distance away from dead center by the size of its success, and I spent the next few years trying to gobble up the experiences of a victorious man when I was still no man at all, and had no real gift for enjoying life. Such a gift usually comes from a series of small victories artfully achieved; my experience had consisted of many small defeats, a few victories, and one explosion… This was experience unlike the experience I had learned from books, and from the war—this was experience without a name – at the time I used to complain that everything was unreal. It took me years to realize that it was my experience, the only one I would have to remember, that my apparently unconnected rat-scufflings and ego-gobblings could be fitted finally into a drastic vision, an introduction of the brave to the horrible, a dream, a nightmare which would belong to others and yet be my own.”