Seventy-five years after its publication, Norman Mailer’s gripping, ambitious debut novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), remains one of the most powerful books about World War II and a towering contribution to the global literature of war. Drawing on Mailer’s experience as a soldier in the 1945 invasion of the Philippines, the novel’s depiction of the taking of the fictitious Pacific island of Anopopei by American forces battling the Japanese is infused with unsparing pessimism and hard-won hope. As Mailer himself reflected, the novel “finds man corrupted, confused to the point of helplessness, but it also finds that there are limits beyond which he cannot be pushed, and it finds that even in his corruption and sickness there are yearnings for a better world.”

The battle for Anopopei unfolds over the course of two grueling months, overseen on the American side by the authoritarian general Edward Cummings, whose motivations for the invasion are bound up with his personal pride and ambition. “There’s one thing about power,” observes Cummings. “It can only flow from the top down.” The decisions of Cummings and his fellow officers, above all the conflicted Lieutenant Hearn, shape the destinies of the men who bear the brunt of the fighting—in particular a fourteen-man reconnaissance platoon under the dictatorial sway of the sadistic Sergeant Croft. The varied prewar lives of these men are revealed through the novel’s “Time Machine” vignettes, rich interludes in Mailer’s taut narrative of the Anopopei campaign. The account of the platoon’s long and harrowing patrol behind enemy lines in Part III, “Plant and Phantom,” is a tour de force of combat fiction.

This expanded collector’s edition also presents twenty-three revealing letters—all but four of them to his first wife, Beatrice—written during the final months of the war and after, while Mailer was in the Philippines and later in occupied Japan. These letters, many published for the first time, offer a glimpse into the novel’s genesis, as Mailer describes his own experience of war and reflects on his process and aims as the work takes shape.

J. Michael Lennon, emeritus professor of English at Wilkes University, is Norman Mailer’s editor and biographer and was founding president of the Mailer Society. His books include the biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013) and Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014).