Desert D’Or is the fashionable California resort where Hollywood’s glittering elite converge when they need a break from city of celluloid dreams. It is an incestuous hothouse of a town—a haven for manipulators, film stars, lovers, pimps, producers, whores, gamblers, scriptwriters and cheats.

Into this nightmare world of depravity arrives Sergius O’Shaughnessy, recently discharged from the Air Force, traumatized by his war experiences and trying to write the Great American Novel. But O’Shaughnessy’s burning ambition begins to lose its edge; lured by greed and ruled by weakness, he soon becomes disturbingly familiar with the dangerous life of slick compromises and a sexual follies…

The Deer Park is a powerful and vigorous satire on Hollywood’s excesses and corruption. Combining a savage imagination with a heightened documentary realism, Mailer paints an uncompromising and terrifying portrait of a decadent society lost in moral confusion and despair.