The Armies of the Night

Norman Mailer's THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, which chronicles the historic 1967 protest march on the Pentagon in Washington D.C., won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize and is considered one of the definitive anti-war documents of the Vietnam era. Its first section, "History as a Novel," is as colorful and immediate as a work of fiction, presenting Mailer as a character in the drama. In visceral prose, he filters the events through his point of view--events that include the arrests of thousands of demonstrators, among them Mailer himself. The second half, "The Novel as History," employs a more sober and objective historical perspective on the march, the events that prompted it, the increasing anti-war sentiment in the country, and the government's determination--ultimately a futile one--to stamp it out. Mailer's ego-driven, iconoclastic, and fascinating narrative provides a wide-open window into a period of American history that has been endlessly recorded--but perhaps never so well.