1944

Drafted into the U.S. Army in January. On 7 January, he marries Bea, who joins the Waves and is commissioned.

In February, completes his second novel, A Transit to Narcissus (also based on his work at Boston State Hospital), which is not published until 1978.

On 27 March, is inducted into the army at Camp Upton on Long Island. His novella about combat in the South Pacific, "A Calculus at Heaven", written his senior year, is included in Edwin Seaver's Cross-Section: A Collection of American Writing, published in May.

In August, after four months of training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he is sent to Fort Ord, California as an artillery trainee.

On 6 December, he ships out on the U.S.S. Sea Barb from San Francisco, arriving in New Guinea, Hollandia Harbor, on December 25, and on 29 December at Leyte Gulf, Philippines. Reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, two works that influenced him deeply.

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  Barbara Mailer, 1942.

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  Mailer at Fort Bragg, Summer 1944.

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  Beatrice Mailer, 1944.