The Naked and the Dead appeared in the United States in May 1948, exactly three years after the day of the Allied victory in World War II. Norman Mailer was then twenty-six years old, and after graduating from Harvard and enlisting in the army he had been among the troops that occupied Japan after the defeat. Critics called his work “the greatest war novel written in this century,” which over time has become a mythical book. Mailer was compared to Hemingway and Tolstoy and was immediately placed among the greats of American literature.

In Anopopei, a small island in the Pacific in the shape of an ocarina, a closed universe where laws and feelings very different from those of civilian life govern, a patrol of young soldiers, microcosm of American society – there are Hearn, a young intellectual who reads Rilke; the realistic and ruthless Sergeant Croft; Ridges, a redneck; Red Valsen, Montana miner and anarcho-syndicalist; Gallagher, an Irish Catholic from the slums of Boston and, hanging over them all, the powerful shadow of General Cummings, born in the deepest and most fundamentalist America, secretly fascinated by the new order of fascism...–, is sent on a reconnaissance mission, a long march through unknown, mine-filled terrain that will end in a nightmare of abjection and heroism, possibly as gratuitous as the war itself.

Pushed to the last limit, permanently naked in the face of death, Mailer's heroes question the truths of the past and the validity of American ideals, live obsessed by sex and suffer and make others suffer the corruptions and arbitrariness of power.