Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn. He entered Harvard at sixteen, where he studied aeronautical engineering before discovering his vocation as a writer. After graduating in 1943, he was drafted into the Army and served in the Pacific theater as a rifleman with the 112th Cavalry, an experience that provided the material for The Naked and the Dead. Published in 1948, the novel became an immediate bestseller and made Mailer famous at twenty-five. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by The Naked and the Dead.