Nobody Could Sleep
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 21; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 21.
I became a Mailer man when I opened a drawer in a desk where I had just begun work, seated in a cubbyhole in a remote part of the office complex, my first full-time job after college, and I was surprised to find a copy of a dusty book, hard-cover, over 500 pages.
This was 1960 and the book was Advertisements for Myself. This was interesting because I was starting work in an advertising agency, a kid from the Bronx in throbbing Manhattan, another planet, earning $60 a week. And I spent a fair amount of time, semi-covert, reading Norman Mailer instead of writing whatever ads for remote publications I was assigned to write.
I still have the book, of course, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959. And elsewhere, among the ancient paperbacks on the top shelf in a back room, there is The Naked and the Dead, 1948, 559 pages, Signet, 75 cents, and at the bottom of the front cover: Over 2 million copies sold.
First sentence: “Nobody could sleep.”
Don DeLillo