For the country’s 250th year, Esquire has published “The 26 Most American Books of All Time” — not best books, the editors are careful to say, but “books that exemplify America.” The rules were strict: sustained prose only, no short stories, essays, poetry, or plays, and none of the high-school usual suspects. The list runs from Noah Webster’s dictionary and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative through Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, On the Road, Blood Meridian, and Lonesome Dove.
The Naked and the Dead (1948) made the cut. In an entry by Kevin McDonnell, Mailer’s debut is praised as so “painstakingly detailed, that it reads like a well-written duty officer’s report,” and credited — half seriously — as quite possibly “the reason there’s always a guy from Brooklyn in every World War II movie ever made.” McDonnell then sketches the arc the book set in motion: the novel “made Mailer a celebrity, and he turned his celebrity into something else,” the writer who “became a provocateur.”
Seventy-eight years on, the first book still reads as the American book.