Barbary Shore

Barbary Shore
First edition
AuthorNorman Mailer
LanguageEnglish
PublisherRinehart & Company
Publication date
1951
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Preceded byThe Naked and the Dead 
Followed byThe Deer Park 

Barbary Shore is Norman Mailer's second published novel, written after Mailer's great success with his 1948 debut The Naked and the Dead. It concerns a protagonist who rents a room in a Brooklyn boarding house with the intention of writing a novel. Wounded during World War II, he is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to him. After Rinehart & Company published the novel in 1951, it received negative reviews and sold poorly. The failure of Barbary Shore and moderate success of Mailer's next novel, The Deer Park (1955) triggered a decade-long hiatus from the novel by Mailer, which ended with the publication of An American Dream in 1965.