One of the finest American novels ever written, Norman Mailer's classic account of the Philippines campaign of WW2.

Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead' is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of warfare.

Focusing on the experiences of a fourteen-man platoon stationed on a Japanese-held island in the South Pacific during World War II, and written in a journalistic style, it tells the moving story of the soldiers' struggle to retain a sense of dignity amidst the horror of warfare, and to find a source of meaning in their lives amisdst the sounds and fury of battle.

About the author

"This book is really two books. It is a biography, and it is also a pictorial retrospective of an actress whose greatest love affair was conceivably with the camera," wrote Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography, Marilyn. Now TASCHEN has paired Mailer's original text with Bert Stern's photographs from the legendary Last Sitting-widely considered the most intimate photographs of Monroe ever taken-to create a fitting tribute to the woman who, at the time of her death in 1962, was the world's most famous, a symbol of glamour and eroticism for an entire generation. But though she was feted and adored by her public, her private life was that of a little girl lost, desperate to find love and security. Mailer's Marilyn is beautiful, tragic, and complex. As Mailer reflects upon her life-from her bleak childhood through to the mysterious circumstances of her death-she emerges as a symbol of the bizarre decade during which she reigned as Hollywood's greatest female star. This book, conceived by Lawrence Schiller, Mailer's collaborator on five works, combines the author's masterful text with Stern's penetrating images of the 36-year-old Marilyn. Photographed for Vogue magazine over three days at the Bel-Air Hotel, Marilyn had never allowed such unfettered access, nor had she looked so breathtakingly beautiful. Six weeks later, mysteriously, she was dead. In this bold synthesis of literary classic and legendary portrait-sitting, Mailer and Stern lift the veils of confusion surrounding Monroe-the woman, the star, the sex symbol-and offer profound insight into an iconic figure whose true personality remains an enigma even today.

Michael Mann's biopic Ali starring Will Smith, Jon Voight and Jamie Foxx opens on general release in January 2002. Read more about Muhammad Ali in the Penguin Modern Classic The Fight.

In perhaps his most important literary feat, Norman Mailer fashions an unprecedented portrait of one of the great villains--and enigmas--in United States history. Here is Lee Harvey Oswald--his family background, troubled marriage, controversial journey to Russia, and return to an "America waiting] for him like an angry relative whose eyes glare in the heat." Based on KGB and FBI transcripts, government reports, letters and diaries, and Mailer's own international research, this is an epic account of a man whose cunning, duplicity, and self-invention were both at home in and at odds with the country he forever altered.
Praise for "Oswald's Tale"
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"America's largest mystery has found its greatest interpreter."--"The Washington Post Book World"
"Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection."--Robert Stone, "The New York Review of Books"
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"A narrative of tremendous energy and panache; the author at the top of his form."--Christopher Hitchens, "Financial Times"
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"The performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity."--Martin Amis, "The Sunday Times "(London)
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Praise for Norman Mailer
" Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation."--"The New York Times"
"A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent."--"The New Yorker"
"Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."--"The Washington Post"
"A devastatingly alive and original creative mind."--"Life"
"Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance."--"The New York Review of Books"
"The largest mind and imagination in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book."--"Chicago Tribune"
"Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream."--"The Cincinnati Post"

October 21, 1967, Washington, D.C. 20,000 to 200,000 protesters are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day's events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mould of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth. The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties' tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.

Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer with a penchant for nicotine, alcohol and blondes with money, struggles towards consciousness twenty-four days and nights after his wife has left him. He has a bad case of alcohol amnesia, a fresh and throbbing tattoo and a car drenched in blood. Just to make his hangover complete, Provincetown's Chief of Police would like a quiet word... So begins Madden's disquieting journey into the dark recesses of America's psyche. TOUGH GUYS DON'T DANCE is Norman Mailer at his tough, raw and uncompromising best. And Madden's tormented efforts to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening turn, inevitably into fragments of the American Nightmare.

Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties and Fifties, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical commentary. Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent and vigorous writer, this manifesto of Mailer's key beliefs contains pieces on his war experiences in the Philippines (the basis for his famous first novel The Naked and the Dead), tributes to fellow novelists William Styron, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and magnificent polemics against pornography, advertising, drugs and politics. Also included is his notorious exposition of the phenomenon of the 'White Negro', the Beat Generation's existentialist hero whose life, like Mailer's, is 'an unchartered journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self'

On October 30, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire, at the virtual center of Africa, two boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to confront each other in an epic match. One was Muhammad Ali, who vowed to reclaim the championship he had lost. The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble and who kept his hands in his pockets "the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case." Observing them both was Norman Mailer, whose grasp of the titanic battle's feints and stratagems-and sensitivity to their deeper symbolism-made his 1975 book The Fight a masterpiece of sportswriting. Whether analyzing the fighters' moves, interpreting their characters, or weighing their competing claims on the African and American souls, Mailer was a commentator of unparalleled acumen-and surely one of the few intrepid enough to accompany Ali on a late-night run through the bush. Through The Fight he restores our tarnished notions of heroism to a blinding gleam, and establishes himself as a champion in his own right. Over four decades after its original publication, this edition of The Fight has been introduced and abridged by Mailer scholar J. Michael Lennon and illustrated for the first time with principal photography by the two men who captured Ali and Foreman in the ring and in private like no one else: Neil Leifer and Howard L. Bingham. Widely considered to be the greatest sports photographer of his generation, Neil Leifer's vibrant color coverage dominates from ringside. It also serves as a living testimony to the pageantry, sheer physical power, and deep psychological interplay of the fighters, their camps, and their controversial host, Zaire's President Mobutu Sese Seko. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Howard Bingham was Ali's constant companion, documenting his every move from the moment he stepped off the plane in Zaire, his daily training regime, right through to the dressing room tension as he prepared to face Foreman once and for all. Together with pictures from other photojournalists, reproductions of Mailer's original manuscript pages, and additional visual documentation of the media frenzy surrounding the "Rumble in the Jungle," the result is a dazzling tribute to The Champ and a vivid document of one of the most epic, adrenaline-laced events in sporting history.

Miami, Summer 1968. The Vietnam War is raging; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy have just been assassinated. The Republican Party meets in Miami and picks Richard Nixon as its candidate, to little fanfare. But when the Democrats back Lyndon Johnson's ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the city of Chicago erupts. Antiwar protesters fill the streets and the police run amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike, all broadcast on live television, and captured in these pages by one of America's fiercest intellects.

Mailer's superb account, written as it was happening, of the first attempt to land men on the moon 'Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.' A Fire on the Moon tells the scarcely credible story of the Apollo 11 mission. It is suffused with Mailer's obsession both with the astronauts themselves and with his own anxieties and terrors about the extremity of what they were trying to achieve. Mailer is both admiring and appalled and the result is a book which is both a gripping narrative and a brilliant depiction of the now-forgotten technical issues and uncertainties around the mission. A Fire on the Moon is also a matchless portrait of an America caught in a morass of introspection and misery, torn apart by the war in Vietnam. But for one, extraordinary week in the summer of 1969 all eyes were on the fates of three men in a rocket, travelling a quarter of a million miles away from Earth. With an introduction by Geoff Dyer.

Norman Mailer peers into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male in a brilliant crime novel that transcends genre. When Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer living on Cape Cod, awakes with a gruesome hangover, a painful tattoo on his upper arm, and a severed female head in his marijuana stash, he has almost no memory of the night before. As he reconstructs the missing hours, Madden runs afoul of retired prizefighters, sex addicts, mediums, former cons, a world-weary ex-girlfriend, and his own father, old now but still a Herculean figure. Stunningly conceived and vividly composed, "Tough Guys Don't Dance "represents Mailer at the peak of his powers.
Praise for "Tough Guys Don't Dance"
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"Spectacular . . . Norman Mailer] makes every word count, like a master knife thrower zinging stilettos in a circle around your head."--"People"
"As brash, brooding and ultimately mesmerizing as the author himself . . . Mailer strikes a] dazzling balance between humor and horror."--New York "Daily News"
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"A first-rate page-turner of a murder mystery . . . full of great characters, littered with dead bodies and replete with plausible suspects."--"Chicago Tribune"
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" "Tough Guys Don't Dance"] has that charming Mailer bravado."--"The New York Times"
Praise for Norman Mailer
" Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation."--"The New York Times"
"A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent."--"The New Yorker"
"Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."--"The Washington Post"
"A devastatingly alive and original creative mind."--"Life"
"Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance."--"The New York Review of Books"
"The largest mind and imagination in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book."--"Chicago Tribune"
"Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream."--"The Cincinnati Post"

"From the Paperback edition."

As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. One part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go.

A time for greatness: Norman Mailer s game-changing coverage of John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign With his Hollywood good looks, boundless enthusiasm, and mesmeric media presence, John F. Kennedy was destined to capture the imaginations of the more than 70 million Americans who watched the nation s first televised presidential debate. Just days after beating out Richard Nixon by the narrowest margin in history, Kennedy himself said, It was the TV more than anything else that turned the tide. But one man begged to differ: writer Norman Mailer, who bragged that his pro-Kennedy treatise, Superman Comes to the Supermarket, had won the election for Kennedy. Whether or not that was the case, the article, published in Esquire magazine just weeks before polls opened, did redefine political reporting and New Journalism with Mailer's frank, first-person voice identifying Kennedy as the existential hero who could awaken the nation from its postwar slumber and conformist Eisenhower years. Now, TASCHEN reimagines this no-holds-barred portrait of one of America s most revered presidents on his path to the White House, publishing Mailer s essay in book form with over 300 photographs that bring the campaign and the candidate s family to life. These images were captured by some of the great photojournalists of the day Cornell Capa, Jacques Lowe, Paul Schutzer, Stanley Tretick, Hank Walker and appear in this volume alongside many never-before-published photos by Garry Winogrand and Burton Berinsky, providing a fascinating look at the man who declared the 60s a time for greatness. "

"The most daring, ambitious and by far the best written of the several very long, daring and ambitious books Norman Mailer has so far produced....Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book....There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Narrated by Harry Hubbard, a second-generation CIA man, HARLOT'S GHOST looks into the depths of the American soul and the soul of Hugh Tremont Montague, code name Harlot, a CIA man obsessed. And Harry is about to discover how far the madness will go and what it means to the Agency and the country....
A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club

One of the first examples of "new journalism" daringly combines reportage with a novelistic style and garnered Mailer his first Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1968.

The final work of fiction from Norman Mailer, a defining voice of the postwar era, is also one of his most ambitious, taking as its subject the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man in possession of extraordinary secrets, follows Adolf from birth through adolescence and offers revealing portraits of Hitler's parents and siblings. A crucial reflection on the shadows that eclipsed the twentieth century, Mailer's novel""delivers myriad twists and surprises along with characteristically astonishing insights into the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all.
Praise for "The Castle in the Forest"
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"This remarkable novel about the young Adolf Hitler, his family and their shifting circumstances, is Mailer's most perfect apprehension of the absolutely alien. . . . Mailer doesn't inhabit these historical figures so much as possess them."--"The New York Times Book Review"
"Terrifically creepy . . . an icy and convincing portrait of the dictator as a young sociopath."--"Entertainment Weekly"
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"The work of a bold and confident writer who may yet be seen as the preeminent novelist of our time . . . a source of tremendous narrative pleasure . . . Every character . . . lives and breathes."--South Florida "Sun-Sentinel"
"Blackly hilarious, beautifully written . . . "The Castle in the Forest"] has vigor, excitement, humor and vastness of spirit."--"The New York Observer"
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Praise for Norman Mailer
" Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation."--"The New York Times"
"A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent."--"The New Yorker"
"Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."--"The Washington Post"
"A devastatingly alive and original creative mind."--"Life"
"Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance."--"The New York Review of Books"
"The largest mind and imagination in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book."--"Chicago Tribune"
"Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream."--"The Cincinnati Post"

"From the Hardcover edition."