03.19

“To Mailer, a Good Soldier Puts War on Paper.” Article-interview by Bob Minzesheimer. USA Today, 10 April 2003. The writer asks a number of war novelists, including Mailer and Tim O’Brien, to comment on how the soldiers in the upcoming war in Iraq will write about it. Mailer says because of the complexity of American motives for going to war, “a soldier in the middle of all that . . . might come home with marvelous stories.” He recalls that when he spoke to an editor in 1946 about writing a war novel, he was discouraged. The editor told him readers had lost interest in war. But when The Naked and the Dead (48.2) came out in the spring of 1948, “readers were ready. It was the luckiest timing of my career.”