The armies of the night : history as a novel, the novel as history

One of the first examples of "new journalism" daringly combines reportage with a novelistic style and garnered Mailer his first Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Armies of the Night centers on the March on the Pentagon, the most famous anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington DC, and the characters that occupy this opposition––the intellectuals, students, African Americans, liberals, and marching women. Mailer, a novelist-as-character, sculpts this impressionably fragile world of the Left versus Authority and Peace versus War, prodding at the Vietnam generation’s deepest anxieties. In the same way Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood introduced the "non-fiction novel," Armies of the Night renders this form, with turns historical and fictional. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Fifty years after the March on the Pentagon, Norman Mailers seminal tour de force remains as urgent and incisive as ever. Winner of Americas two highest literary awards, The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak. The time is October 21, 1967. The place is Washington, D.C. Depending on the paper you read, 20,000 to 200,000 protestors are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is a writer named Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the days events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mold of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth.

One of the first examples of "new journalism" daringly combines reportage with a novelistic style and garnered Mailer his first Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1968.

Following his arrest during the October 1967 anti-Vietnam march at the Pentagon, Mailer wrote of the anger, hippies, bewildered MPs and draft-card burners.

The author chronicles his experiences during the four days of events surrounding the peace march on the Pentagon in October, 1967. This novel interprets and dramatizes the October 1967 anti-war demonstration in Washington and the issues and politics involved