The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History

Armies of the Night is one of the best books of American literature of the last decades. In September 1967, Norman Mailer was invited to participate in a protest march against the war in Vietnam that was to be held next month in Washington. The idea had come from Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and other activists of the Youth International Party. At the anti-army march on the Pentagon on October 21, 1967 many groups of the old and new American left would be represented all groups -hippies , yippies, Weathermen, Quakers, feminists and various urban and suburban groups.

Mailer reluctantly agreed. He was forty-four years and, despite his well-earned reputation for provocative protest in literature as in life. Mailer, along with other American stars of the time who participated, personally suffered repression and later wrote one of the most gritty and intelligent books on the sixties, its myths, its heroes and demons.