1946

Discharged from the Army on 2 May at Ft. Dix, NJ.

From June to September, he and Bea rent a unit at Crow's Nest Cottages, North Truro, near Provincetown, MA, and he begins work on his war novel using many of the hundreds of letters written to his wife and family. He will spend the greater part of most summers for the next six decades in Provincetown, the artists' colony at the tip of Cape Cod.

Mailer's friend Adeline Lubell, an editor at Little, Brown, reads 184 pages of his manuscript, but no contract is offered by Little, Brown because of a negative evaluation by Bernard DeVoto, and the novel's obscene language. Mailer then turns to the New York firm of Rinehart. In November, they offer and Mailer accepts a $1250 advance for The Naked and the Dead (48.22).

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  Mailer in Brooklyn, 1946.