The Naked and the Dead by Mailer, Norman - (c.1948)

New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc.. Near Fine in Good+ dj. (c.1948). First Edition. Hardcover. [solid clean copy with some light shelfwear to the bottom edge (which appears to have been unobtrusively "touched up" just a teensy bit by some amateur restorationist, although you'd hardly notice unless you turned the book upside down and squinted hard at it, like I did); jacket is edgeworn, with shallow chipping at spine ends and at top of rear panel, light browning to spine and edges of flaps, modest wrinkling to spine and both front and rear panels (not really evident from the exterior), a few little nicks here and there]. Mailer's Important Debut Novel, notable for its (almost) no-holds-barred depiction of the ugliness of war, notable also for the introduction of "fug" and its many variants (including "mother-fuggin") as a substitute for a word that was, even then, pretty well known and widely used, albeit not in polite (or public) discourse. (Mailer's concession to his nervous publishers, it was also immortalized in the apocryphal -- and according to Mailer, completely made up by her press agent -- remark of actress Tallulah Bankhead, allegedly uttered upon being introduced to the author: "You're the young man that doesn't know how to spell 'fuck.'") In the somewhat watered-down 1958 movie version, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Aldo Ray, Cliff Robertson and Raymond Massey, not only did nobody say "fuck," but (this still being the era of Hollywood's Production Code) they weren't even permitted to utter a single "goddam," an epithet which appears on pretty much every one of the book's 721 pages. (And to save you the trouble of asking: yes, it's the true first edition/first printing, with the "R" colophon on the copyright page, the $4.00 price showing on the unclipped first-issue dust jacket, and "A Word from the Publisher to the Reader" comprising the complete text of the front and rear flaps, over publisher Stanley Rinehart's printed signature.) .