I read “Naked and the Dead” when I was seventeen. Thought it was a great, great book, kinda like Moby Dick. Think Mailer would have liked that comparison.

Also read Armies of the Night, just god-awful, and Mailer’s take on Oswald and the JfK assassination. Oswald did it because “he was destined to do it”? In reality, it’s what happens when the CIA and FBI fire a President.

His Egypt book is trash. Maybe I’ll go back to “Naked/Dead” again. I’m a lot older than seventeen now.

Mailer was about a time and a place; he understood how to milk the largest demographic in the history of mankind. If he was a genius, that’s his genius. The Boomers were mesmerized.