Talk with Norman Mailer
Harvey Breit's New York Times Book Review interview, ten days after the publication of Barbary Shore, in which Mailer makes his most substantive on-the-record comment about the influence of Moby-Dick on The Naked and the Dead.
“Talk with Norman Mailer.” Interview by Harvey Breit. New York Times Book Review, 3 June 1951, Sec. 7, p. 3.
Important comment on the influence of Moby-Dick on The Naked and the Dead. Mailer on NAD (48.2):
I had Ahab in it, and I suppose the mountain was Moby-Dick. Of course, I also think the book will stand or fall as a realistic novel.
Rpt: The Writer Observed, by Harvey Breit (Cleveland: World, 1956); Conversations with Norman Mailer, ed. J. Michael Lennon (88.6).
See Bernard Horn, “Ahab and Ishmael at War: The Presence of Moby-Dick in The Naked and the Dead,” American Quarterly 34 (fall 1982), 379–95 — for the scholarly reading that takes up Mailer’s cue here.