allegedly, "You're the young man that doesn't know how to spell..." You know, the four-letter word was indicated with all sorts of asterisks. The incident is mentioned in John Green's An Abundance of Katherines. Colin Singleton tells Lindsey Lee Wells he likes to read literary criticism after reading a book. Colin says the publisher indicated that no one in 1948 would buy The Naked and the Dead "'because it contains even more F-bombs than it does Regular Bombs.' So Norman Mailer, as a kind of fug-you to the publisher, went through his 872-page book and changed every last F-word to 'fug.'" The rock band the Fugs took their name from this word. Reception In 1948, at the age of twenty-five, Mailer published The Naked and the Dead, which was extremely successful. The book sold 200,000 copies in its first three months and remained on the New York Times best seller list for 62 weeks. Later, Modern Library named The Naked and the Dead one of the top hundred novels in the English language. Publisher Bennett Cerf declared in 1948 "only three novels published since the first of the year that were worth reading ... Cry, the Beloved Country, The Ides of March, and The Naked and the Dead." Hartley Shawcross as Attorney General for England and Wales explained why he would not prosecute the book under the Obscene Publications Acts: "Whilst there is much in this most tedious and lengthy book which is foul, lewd and revolting, looking at it as a whole I do not think that its intent is to corrupt or deprave or that it is likely to lead to any result other than disgust at its contents." Tom Driberg welcomed the decision. In its initial review the Times Literary Supplement complained that the novel "grows increasingly unreadable" due to Mailer's tendency to "leave nothing out". The Daily Telegraph described the novel as "dull" for the same reason. Later, Gore Vidal would write: My first reaction to The Naked and the Dead was: it’s a fake. A clever, talented, admirably executed fake. I have not changed my opinion of the book since… I do recall a fine description of men carrying a dying man down a mountain… Yet every time I got going in the narrative I would find myself stopped cold by a set of made-up, predictable characters taken not from life, but from the same