Word: mailers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...very-bestseller of 1948 was not The Naked and the Dead after all. Norman Mailer's big, raw war novel (TIME, May 10) had held the lead all summer and much of the fall, sold 125,000 copies. But by New Year's Day, Mailer had lost the race. The man who passed him in the stretch was an old hand at turning out bestsellers. Lloyd C. Douglas' The, Big Fisherman (TIME, Nov. 22)-a novel about Saint Peter-had hit the stands in mid-November, sold a whopping 350,000 copies in a scant six weeks...
Nobody wrote the "Great War Novel" that everybody has taken for granted ever since V-day. But a few writers did try to record their personal experiences, particularly young (25) Norman Mailer, a Pacific veteran whose The Naked and The Dead, a rugged, stormy first novel, whirled straight to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there. Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions also made a great splash, though with far less literary justification...
...books (on the whole) got better, book sales got worse. Sales were off as much as 15% from 1946. Norman Mailer's The Naked and The Dead topped the fiction bestseller lists for 18 weeks, but sold only 130,000 copies...
...last year for their own use. As of last week, BSD reports, TIME'S bestseller list is headed by the following four books: Churchill's Memoirs, The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer...
...Author. Norman Mailer attended public schools in Brooklyn, at Harvard studied engineering, shortly after graduation married Beatrice Silverman (later a lieutenant in the WAVES). During the war he served in Leyte, Luzon and Japan, as a clerk, an aerial photograph expert, a rifleman in a reconnaissance platoon, a cook, a baker. Discharged in 1946, he wrote The Naked and the Dead in a year and a half...