Mailer begins

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com On this day in 1948, Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead was published. A front-page editorial in the London Sunday Times found the language in the novel "incredibly foul and beastly" and lobbied to have the book "withdrawn from publication immediately." Most reviewers, however, agreed with the New York Times that, despite the swearing and being "virtually a Kinsey Report on the sexual behavior of the GI," the book ranked among the best war novels, and was "a commanding performance by a young man of 25 whose gifts are impressive and whose failures are a matter of reach rather than of grasp." The outrage and the praise combined to put the book on the best-seller lists (#51 on the Modern Library's Top 100), and to catapult Mailer to a celebrity status that he claimed to regret.