The chapter provides an overview of literary predecessors whose influence is evident across Mailer’s work, but perhaps most notably in his early work: John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Leo Tolstoy, among others.

After their failure at Gallipoli in 1915, attempts by the Allies to undermine the Ottoman Empire ranged from the eastern Sahara to the Arabian desert, with the resources of India becoming indispensable to the effort against the Turks, especially in Mesopotamia. Returning to India from South Africa in 1914, Mahatma Gandhi supported the war on the grounds that a strong showing would strengthen India’s hand in its relationship with Britain. Most Indians rallied behind the Allied cause and, thanks largely to T. E. Lawrence, Arabs sustained a successful revolt against the Turks. The British had no intention of giving India the degree of self-government that it wanted, and they and the French had no intention of rewarding the Arab contribution with postwar independence (and especially not with Palestine, which the Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised to the Zionists), but within the context of World War I the ends appeared to justify the means. Just as the wartime movements in India and the Arab world foreshadowed future developments, Turkey’s Armenian genocide presaged subsequent state-sponsored attempts to exterminate specific civilian populations. On the fringes of the war in the Middle East, local conflicts from Darfur to Ethiopia and Somalia likewise pointed the way to a grim future.