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Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History As a Novel/the Novel As History (New American Library, 1968) On October 20, 1967, 70,000 anti-war demonstrators gathered in Washington to protest the Vietnam War (a scene made cinematically famous in Forrest Gump), and Norman Mailer was one of them. He played a prominent role, leading discussions and assisting fellow literati (including Robert Lowell, Paul Goodman, and Dwight McDonald), and later wrote a book about the experience. The massive product, Armies of the Night, is a novelistic rendition of Mailer's participation in the event (including two days he spent in jail), told in an omniscient third person voice, with a protagonist named, unsurprisingly, Mailer. The book, which won both a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, and the National Book Award, is structured into two sections, "History as a Novel" and "The Novel as History," and is widely considered an archetype of so-called "new journalism." Richard Gilman writes in the New Republic, "What Mailer has done is not to have written a novel in the form of history, or history in the form of a novel, not to have produced any startling new forms, but to have rescued history from abstraction and aridity by approaching it with certain "novelistic" instruments at the ready and in a certain large, general "novelistic" spirit." (June 8, 1968, Page 27) MORE: PBS ‘American Masters’ page, including links to book reviews, a bio, and a timeline Great New York Times resource page Link to info on the October 1967 Anti-war March |
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