Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially doe the occasion by Norman Mailer. Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing.

Norman Mailer's The Time of Our Time is a giant retrospective, a rich, boisterous portrait of our times seen through the fiction and reportage of one of America's greatest writers. Mailer selected and edited the contents of this work to create an ongoing narrative of events large and small that have shaped America over the last fifty years. Included are passages from The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner's Song, Ancient Evenings, and Harlot's Ghost as well as portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald, Madonna, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon as they appeared in some of his best magazine pieces. How readable is the result! It is as if one is being drawn into a fabulous novel with extraordinary characters, real and fictional, who appear and reappear through the years until a vast mural of America as a nation comes into focus, full of follies and blunders, surprisingly elegant and often crazy--tragic in its losses and large in its triumphs. On display here are Mailer's enormous energies, his vast curiosity, and his powers of delineation. Here too are his errors of judgment and deed, both personal and literary. As a writer, Mailer eschews all limits. He goes at the world like a tiger. What will surprise many readers of The Time of Our Time is what a shrewd and stylish tiger he has been. "From the Hardcover edition."

By general consensus, Pablo Picasso is the most brilliant and influential artist of this century. Despite this supreme position in the history of art, he has nonetheless eluded and frustrated critics. Getting an intimate sense of the character of Picasso appears almost impossible; his macho posture and his incomparable range of styles seem designed to keep everyone who is interested in him at a distance. Who better than another legendary artist, Norman Mailer, to enter inside so enigmatic and protean a mind? In Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, Mailer sets out to capture the meaning of Picasso's life and art and explores in bold fashion the originality of his ambition. Commenting upon much of the critical work on Picasso that has appeared over the years, Mailer's biography brings us closer to the young artist than we have ever been before. Much at the heart of Mailer's interpretation in Picasso's first great love, Fernande Olivier, with whom the artist lived for seven years--a period that included Picasso's most revolutionary works, from the explosive innovations of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to the mysteries of Cubism itself. To understand Picasso in these years, Mailer argues, it is necessary to follow his relationship with the extraordinary Fernande, who is here given her own voice by way of excerpts from her candid memoirs, hitherto unpublished in English. Since this period also includes Picasso's friendships with Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein, the book evokes the charm and special character of bohemian life in Paris in the early 1900s.