The Deer Park

by Norman Mailer

Overview

Desert D'Or is the fashionable California resort where Hollywood's glittering elite converge when they need a break from city of celluloid dreams. It is an incestuous hothouse of a town - a haven for manipulators, film stars, lovers, pimps, producers, whores, gamblers, scriptwriters and cheats.

Into this nightmare world of depravity arrives Sergius O'Shaughnessy, recently discharged from the Air Force, traumatized by his war experiences and trying to write the Great American Novel. But O'Shaughnessy's burning ambition begins to lose its edge; lured by greed and ruled by weakness, he soon becomes disturbingly familiar with the dangerous life of slick compromises and a sexual follies…

The Deer Park is a powerful and vigorous satire on Hollywood's excesses and corruption. Combining a savage imagination with a heightened documentary realism, Mailer paints an uncompromising and terrifying portrait of a decadent society lost in moral confusion and despair.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375700408
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/01/1997
Series:	Vintage International Series
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.

Hometown:

Provincetown, Massachusetts, and New York, New York

Date of Birth:

January 31, 1923

Date of Death:

November 10, 2007

Place of Birth:

Long Branch, New Jersey

Education:

B.S., Harvard University, 1943; Sorbonne, Paris, 1947-48

Read an Excerpt

IN THE CACTUS WILD of Southern California, a distance of two hundred miles from the capital of cinema as I choose to call it is the town of Desert D’Or. There I went from the Air Force to look for a good time. Some time ago.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Deer Park"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Norman Mailer.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Savage . . . brilliant . . . exhilarating."
—Atlantic Monthly

"A writer of the greatest and most reckless talents."
—The New Yorker

"Entertaining and wise. . . . In addition to his furious energy and true ear, Mailer is simpatico with humanity . . . on a level rare in American fiction."
—New Republic

"Studded with brilliant and illuminating passages."
—The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Deer Park
 
“A scathing portrayal of Hollywood . . . studded with brilliant and illuminating passages.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent . . . [Mailer] drives us up and down The Deer Park at breakneck speed. It is a trip through unfamiliar country, for a time funny and then unnerving.”—The New Yorker
 
“Savage . . . brilliant . . . exhilarating.”—The Atlantic Monthly
 
“Entertaining and wise . . . In addition to his furious energy and true ear, Mailer is simpatico with humanity . . . on a level rare in American fiction.”—The New Republic
 
Praise for Norman Mailer
 
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times
 
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker
 
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post
 
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life
 
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books
 
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune
 
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—The Cincinnati Post

From the Publisher