Mailer, Norman; Brief 1948 an Antonina Vallentin

Über "Die Nackten und die Toten"
Mailer, Norman, amerikan. Schriftsteller, zweifacher Pulitzerpreisträger (1923-2007). Brief m. U. "Norman Mailer" und Umschlag. 1 S. Gr. 4to. (New York) 16.XI.1948.

An Antonina Vallentin in Paris. Dankt ihr für einen Brief und macht wichtige Aussagen über die Umstände der Entstehung seines in diesem Jahr erschienenen ersten und zugleich berühmtesten Werkes: "... I must confess that I feel like Dalleson who makes a few blundering moves and the whole battle, the whole campaign, roll away from under him. You know I wrote The Naked an the Dead in what amounted to isolation. I knew very few people at the time and I used to work every day with a certain kind of ingenious simplicity which is going to be very difficult to recapture. Perhaps that is a large reason for the book's virtue. Since I was not in the world or with the world at that time, I was able to construct my own world in a book. Since then there have been so many faces and so much activity, the Wallace movement and all the absurdities of being a 90-day celebrity. I suppose I feel like a character in a Kafka novel ...". Ferner über den Beginn einer neuen Novelle, einen französischen Übersetzer und über seine Pläne für eine Frankreich-Reise. - Selten.