The Naked and the Dead by Mailer, Norman - 1948

New York: Rinehart and Company, 1948. First printing. Hardcover. Good/fair. 721pp. Octavo [21.5 cm] Black cloth. The hinges are weak, and there is a lending library stamp of the verso of the rear free endsheet. The title, author, date (5/7/48 - the day after the official Rinehart release) and price ($4.00) by hand in ink filling in the appropriate blanks of the stamp. First issue jacket is worn and torn in half. Signed by the author in blue ink on the front free endsheet. Signed first edition of the author's highly successful, and Pulitzer Prize winning, first book that was based on the author's own wartime experiences. Burgess 99 title.

"I came out of the Army with an idea for a novel about a long patrol, an idea which had been bound in its origins to a mountain which was to serve as both an actual mass of stone and as a symbolic base for the book. The original conception was allegorical. The mountain was a consciously ambiguous symbol, something too complex, too tangible, to be defined by language." - Norman Mailer.