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

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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

3.61 of 5 stars 3.61 · rating details · 1,412 ratings · 121 reviews

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.

Paperback, 304 pages

Published January 1st 1995 by Plume (first published January 1st 1968)

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

More…

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

History as Literature

104th out of 356 books — 278 voters

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Best Non-Fiction (non biography)

455th out of 2,110 books — 3,795 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 2,521)

filter | sort: default (?) | rating details

Jan 09, 2008 gaby rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Mailer enthusiasts, 60's revisionists

Shelves: nonfiction, new-journalism

Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer. I believe I will take a page from Mr. Christopher Hitchens, who did NOT have a problem blasting Jerry Falwell on national television while the corpse was still warm (http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/05...), and make some honest yet unflattering remarks about Mailer, whose goodreads update feed currently shows him reading The Handbook for the Recently Deceased.

This book is kind of a 'literary' atrocity. It is everything I would expect from an overblown superfamous...more

6 likes · like · see review

Jul 04, 2008 Rebecca rated it 4 of 5 stars

In this nonfiction novel, Mailer depicts the Mailer character (the Mailer character should not be mistaken for the wilier flesh-and-blood Mailer) as a glowering, self-important drunk whose main objective is to marinate in whiskey and public adulation.

By Mailer's own admission, his attendance at the 1967 March on the Pentagon is a concession to his moral opposition to the Vietnam war, which he would rather practice in the company of fellow aesthetes at exclusive cocktail parties. Reluctantly, he...more In this nonfiction novel, Mailer depicts the Mailer character (the Mailer character should not be mistaken for the wilier flesh-and-blood Mailer) as a glowering, self-important drunk whose main objective is to marinate in whiskey and public adulation.

By Mailer's own admission, his attendance at the 1967 March on the Pentagon is a concession to his moral opposition to the Vietnam war, which he would rather practice in the company of fellow aesthetes at exclusive cocktail parties. Reluctantly, he attends the march, flinging contempt in every direction: at comfortable liberal academics ("like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy"), at hawkish conservatives, at the United States ("corporation land"), at the young ("utterly lobotomized away from the sense of sin"), at the old, at radicals ("smelted down the the irreducible Puritan"), and at himself. In fact, Mailer reserves praise only for those who regard him with skepticism, piercing the thin skin of his intellectual nobility to reveal the crass, angry, disturbed man underneath. The Mailer character is unappealing in most ways, save an occasional kindness (playing games with the kids in jail) and the fact that his every repugnance is a meta-act of elaborate, tongue-in-cheek self-abasement.

The "novel as history" is followed by 50 pages of "history as novel," a comparatively dry review of the various accounts of the March on the Pentagon, the fractious liberals, the celebration and defiling of conservative power, all told from a dozen different, mutually incompatible perspectives. Mailer hammers home the point that no retelling of the events of 1967 can or will be objective or factually reliable. Hence his "novel as history," hence his brash anti-hero. I am tempted to say that Mailer's bombast is neutralized by the ruthless critical eye he applies to himself, but that would be inaccurate. By turning himself into a celebrity curmudgeon, Mailer celebrates his own flaws. But he also celebrates those of his political allies and enemies, and somehow, in spite of the pointed subjectivity, or by way of it, his novel rings of truth.(less)

3 likes · like · see review

Apr 16, 2008 Erik Simon rated it 1 of 5 stars

He was a silly, shallow man who wrote silly, shallow books, and I'll go to my grave not understanding what was the fuss. I honestly think the New York elite, on the whole an effete bunch, welcomed this guy into their circle just because he was an ass-kicker. This book, his supposed masterpiece, is proof of his silliness. Check this sentence out: “Just as professional football players love sex because it is so close to football, so he was fond of speaking in public because it was thus near to wri...more

3 likes · like · see review

Dec 24, 2012 Carolyn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, memoir, politics

Written in third person, describing a weekend in Washington protesting the Vietnam war, Mailer pokes fun at himself, and his ego, and his other eccentricities on nearly every page. Yes, Mailer has an egotism of curious disproportions. With the possible exception of John F. Kennedy, there had not been a President of the United States nor even a candidate since the Second World War whom Mailer secretly considered more suitable than himself... Hilarious.

Lots of neat literary moments, his complex f...more

like · see review

Dec 23, 2011 robert rated it 3 of 5 stars

A strange, strange tale. Mailer is so interested in himself that he explores every facet of every thought that pops into his head. We, of course, cannot share such fascination, and as a result chunks of this text are boring.

There is great stuff in here - great honesty (he's not afraid to highlight his own absurdity), insight, satire (especially of the media), tale telling, comedy, political reporting. It's just that I had to edit it myself since Norman didn't bother.

Though the March on the Pen...more

like · see review

Jan 19, 2011 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's as if Mailer read George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and set out to prove Orwell wrong. Very rarely can I get through a book whose gratuitous use of overly-complex syntax and thesaurus-worthy words without thinking that the author is simply a bloviating douche with nothing to say. Mailer falls into that rarity.

Don't get me wrong; Mailer loves himself, but fortunately for the reader it is not to his/her detriment. Mailer's use of prose is unparalleled, except for a select fe...more

like · see review

Oct 25, 2011 Matt Simmons rated it 4 of 5 stars

What a profound, and what a profoundly frustrating, book. I had to force myself through the early parts, something I've gotten stuck on the couple of times when I've tried to read this book before. Mailer is a tremendous boor, and the fictionalized version of himself is even more so. Of course, Mailer himself is aware of this, and this makes the book both very enjoyable and deeply unpalatable. The standard postmodern disassociation of self is on full, eye-rolling, boring display here, though, st...more What a profound, and what a profoundly frustrating, book. I had to force myself through the early parts, something I've gotten stuck on the couple of times when I've tried to read this book before. Mailer is a tremendous boor, and the fictionalized version of himself is even more so. Of course, Mailer himself is aware of this, and this makes the book both very enjoyable and deeply unpalatable. The standard postmodern disassociation of self is on full, eye-rolling, boring display here, though, strangely enough, the author's willingness to show himself as a cad is courageous and wonderfully honest. Similarly, once you get past the cringe-inducing presentations of Mailer himself, we see yawn-inducing, predictable championing of the Left--and then, alongside this, inseparable from this, the Left is shown as a petty, dishonest and disorganized thing, lost in its own complexities, crippled by these and, all the while, the non-Left, the small town and rural crew-cut citizens of the Republic, are generously presented figures full of honor and heroism, even when they are clearly being shown as the villains (and what wretched villains they can be, too).

This is a book, then, about honesty: that, perhaps, is the goal of the whole move towards trying to do "history" in different forms. What is the most honest way to present a irreducibly complex situation? That's Mailer's question, his quest here. And while much of this is nothing new for our 21st century minds, I think we owe Mailer thanks that we think in this way, and need to go back to him, to reconsider the methods of truth-telling we inhabit, we rely upon.

I could never read this book as a complete narrative again. But I think that's okay. This is perhaps a book taken first as a narrative, and then as a source to be excerpted, to be revisited in chunks, in pieces, in moments of reflection. Some of Mailer's observations about America are once again relevant (maybe they never stopped being relevant), some of the ways in which he tries to understand our nation are profound and profoundly necessary; I was especially moved by his meditations on the liberal middle classes jealousies of the working classes, of the position of the South, of the rural and small town, of the essential entrapment of the urban.

Honesty, indeed: a book that masquerades as a retelling of protest against the Vietnam war, and actually a book about how America fits together.

Let me be crystal clear--the character "Mailer" is a despicable cad, much like the character the author presented himself as in his real life. But the honest, seeking moral consciousness that shines through the book in places, that even, sometimes, takes over as narrator--that's a really, wonderfully, beautifully profound and necessary mind. Pity they occupied the same author, pity they make this book exasperating to the point of unreadability in places. But, again, that might be, in its own subtle way, the most honest depiction of the American condition possible.(less)

like · see review

Aug 21, 2011 Erik Graff rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Mailer fans, students of the 60s

Recommended to Erik by: no one

Shelves: political-social-science

Although I can find no ready reference to it, I believe this book was published, perhaps in serialized form, in a magazine like Harpers or the Atlantic (both of which I subscribed to back then). In any case, I recall reading it in such a format while still in high school, when the Pentagon demonstration was still a fresh memory. It was, I believe, the first full-length book I'd ever read by Norman Mailer, an author familiar to me from parental and grandparental bookshelves.

1 like · like · see review

Jan 02, 2012 David Hewitt rated it 4 of 5 stars

There's a lot to like and a lot to dislike about this book, but in the balance, its status as a great accomplishment in nonfiction is well earned. The "lot to dislike" all hovers around Mailer himself, who appears in the book as a novelized character, spoken of in the 3rd person, and as its protagonist, during the four days surrounding the March on the Pentagon in 1967. Mailer as character is in many ways unlikeable, but to his credit, he makes little attempt to hide his unlikeability--egomaniac...more There's a lot to like and a lot to dislike about this book, but in the balance, its status as a great accomplishment in nonfiction is well earned. The "lot to dislike" all hovers around Mailer himself, who appears in the book as a novelized character, spoken of in the 3rd person, and as its protagonist, during the four days surrounding the March on the Pentagon in 1967. Mailer as character is in many ways unlikeable, but to his credit, he makes little attempt to hide his unlikeability--egomaniac that he is, he dwells on his own thoughts, and is fair enough to honestly reveal the ugly and unbecoming thoughts (of which there are a lot) as readily as his decent or even noble ones.

The first part of the book, the bulk of the book, is what Mailer calls "history as novel," the above-mentioned 3rd-person account of actual events from his own perspective. Mailer might have dwelt more upon the the people around him--he was surrounded by the likes of poet Robert Lowell or Noam Chomsky--but chooses instead to dwell mainly upon himself and his own thoughts. I think it's fair to give him the benefit of the doubt and presume his intent was to show the content of his own subjective experience in the form of his thoughts, which, for better or for worse, revolved mostly around himself. He can be given credit, I think, for the honesty this entails, and in fact he is, if not likeable or even sympathetic, a compelling character. His prose is in places overblown, but in places as powerful as that of any other writer I could name.

Ironically, but probably intentionally, the book's most powerful section is the final one, where Mailer switches from "history as novel" to "novel as history," and takes the narrative away from himself to a summary of events as they unfolded at the Pentagon after he'd been arrested and hauled off. If you choose to read this book, and I do recommend it, you won't have a fair perspective on it if you give up on it before reading the finale. There's always a danger, in novels, of the many strands not all coming together in the end to bring a satisfactory ending; in a sense, Mailer avoids this problem by a dramatic shift from fictionalized non-fiction to what more closely approaches conventional non-fiction (I use these words guardedly, because this book pulls the curtain back on the very idea that any book is "nonfiction"). This final section really shines, and its musings on government power, the idea of America, and the relationship between patriotism and conscience have great relevance to today's Occupy movements and the war-without-end we've now embarked upon.(less)

like · see review

Apr 06, 2012 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, memoir

This book (pioneering, perhaps, in the footsteps of Capote's In Cold Blood) hyped itself as "historical fiction" but in actuality, it's a memoir written in third person, regarding the March on the Pentagon (invoking a medieval exorcism, an attempt to drive out the evil spirits which seem to have taken up permanent residence, here & now, forty-five years later) on October 21-2, 1967. Mailer, no slouch when it comes to promotion of his own, ever inflated ego, nonetheless captures a true spirit...more

like · see review

Jul 20, 2012 Kirk rated it 3 of 5 stars

[taking a rain check on dinner:] “Promise?”
“Next time I'm in Washington,” he lied like a psychopath. The arbiter of nicety in him had observed with horror over many a similar occasion that he was absolutely without character for any social situation in which a pause could become the mood's abyss, and so he always filled the moment with the most extravagant amalgams of possibility. Particularly he did this at the home of liberal academics. They were brusque to the world of manners, they had buil...more [taking a rain check on dinner:] “Promise?”
“Next time I'm in Washington,” he lied like a psychopath. The arbiter of nicety in him had observed with horror over many a similar occasion that he was absolutely without character for any social situation in which a pause could become the mood's abyss, and so he always filled the moment with the most extravagant amalgams of possibility. Particularly he did this at the home of liberal academics. They were brusque to the world of manners, they had built their hope of heaven on the binary system and the computer, 1 and 0, Yes and No—they had little to do therefore with the spectrum of grace and acceptance and refusal; if you did not do what they wished, you had simply denied them. Now Mailer was often brusque himself, famous for that, but the architecture of his personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his enemy. (Mailer had not been married four times for nothing.) If he was on many an occasion brusque, he was also to himself at least so supersensitive to nuances of manner he sometimes suspected when in no modest mood that Proust had lost a cell mate the day they were born in different bags. (Bag is of course used here to specify milieu and not the exceptional character of the mothers, Mme. Proust and I.B. Mailer.) At any rate, boldness, attacks of shyness, rude assertion, and circumlocutions tortured as arthritic fingers working at lace, all took their turn with him, and these shuttlings of mood became most pronounced in their resemblance to the banging and shunting of freight cars when he was with liberal academics. Since he—you are in on the secret—disapproved of them far more than he could afford to reveal (their enmity could be venomous) he therefore exerted himself to push up a synthetic exaggerated sweetness of manner, and his conversations with liberal ideologues on the consequence consisted almost entirely of overcorrections of the previous error.
(less)

like · see review

Dec 30, 2009 Shawna rated it 1 of 5 stars

This book made me hate Norman Mailer. Really. I wished him dead after reading this book. And this after I had read and fallen in love with his book "Executioner's Song." This book is narcissism pure and simple, the fact that it won the National Book Award makes me question the validity of that award. After I read this book, I picked up the memoir written by Mailer's second wife Adele, the one he stabbed.(Yeah, did you know Mailer actually stabbed one of his wives? One gets the impression he want...more

like · see review

Feb 05, 2011 Jeff rated it 4 of 5 stars

In presenting the contrast between novel (as history) and history proper, Mailer includes about 75 pages of dry history to end the book. It does draw out the virtues of the novel as history--the inner perspective of the protagonist of the novel (Mailer himself) makes us privy to a dimension present in all events, but never present in works of history proper. We thus ponder the inadequacy of the factual deliverances of historical writing. The cost of this means of presentation is to bore the read...more

like · see review

Jul 25, 2012 Josh Fish rated it 2 of 5 stars

A record of Norman Mailer's involvement in the anti-Vietnam-war protests written by him in the third person about him. I found this book full of false modesty (he even uses the word modest when talking about himself. Who calls themselves modest?) and self aggrandizement. He describes himself as almost a superhero taking on the giant war machine. This attitude of great men fighting against tyranny is the same rhetoric used by warmongers which I thought was ironic and something it seems surely Mai...more

like · see review

May 02, 2013 Timothy Eklund rated it 3 of 5 stars

I literally randomly selected this book to read, and under the circumstances I think chaos ended pretty well for me. At the beginning especially, Mailer has a tendency to self-indulge on a personal persona that's a bit like if Hunter S. Thompson was less manic and more of a self-absorbed asshole, but once he gets to the actual march on the Pentagon and his experiences in jail, it becomes a lot more engaging. Mailer's writing style is brisk and confident, and I actually actively dislike him and d...more

like · see review

May 10, 2009 Jim McGarrah rated it 4 of 5 stars

I'm not a big Mailer fan. I finally brought myself to read this book because I had worked with some of the principal people in the book later (71-72) when VVAW was really active in the peace movement and I wanted to see how Mailer treated their personalities since I knew them. Also, I sometimes teach a class on the war and the anit-war movement and I'm always looking for good literature of the period. I was pleasantly surprised with Mailer's self-deprecating and honest voice. He admits to being...more

like · see review

Oct 26, 2012 Kelli Wilson rated it 4 of 5 stars

An interesting two-part novel/history of the protest that "turned the tide" on the war in Vietnam. Be prepared for two hundred pages of Norman Mailer describing his own pathetic involvement in the protest (you're not going to like him very much). However, the remaining part of the book offers some interesting analysis of the aesthetic behind the protest, and his description of the events which took place after the "official" protest was over, especially to the few hundred who stayed through the...more

like · see review

Jul 08, 2012 Andrew Tolve rated it 3 of 5 stars

Most of the claims against this book are that Mailer is an egomaniac, which he is, and that his writing therefore comes off as overly saturated with himself, which it does. But to discount the book entirely on these grounds is foolish, for Mailer is brilliantly, hilariously, repeatedly aware of his own egomaniacism and almost at play with it throughout the novel/history. The result is a book that makes you smile at one's man wit and intelligence (there's no denying the latter) and appreciate the...more

like · see review

Jul 10, 2011 Judith rated it 5 of 5 stars

My English professor warned that I would either "love Mailer or hate him." There is definitely no middle ground with this writer. Aside from the bouts of egomania, I learned a lot about the mood of America during the Vietnam war, Mailer's perceptions of the Old versus New Liberalism, the working class versus the urban middle class, and the schizophrenia of America, and on and on the ideas go! As for Mailer's ego, I think his celebration of it is comical, and not to be taken too seriously. Better...more

like · see review

Jan 29, 2009 Rachelterry rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

This was a hard one for me to rate. Parts of this book are sheer genius, but you have to wade through so much to get to those parts. The man is a self-proclaimed ego-maniac, and there's plenty of evidence to back up his claim. I thought he was so annoying for the first 50 or so pages, but by the time he's putting on his rumpled three piece vest and mother-of-pearl cuff links to face the judge after having spent the night in jail, I actually felt a little affection for him, which I guess explains...more

like · see review

Jun 10, 2011 Mac rated it 2 of 5 stars

I'm not sure if it was the intended seriousness of the topic, but unlike "The Fight," a book I very much admired by Mr. Mailer, "The Armies of the Night" was not nearly as enjoyable as I had hoped. It won heaps of awards and was clearly tapping into the contemporary zeitgeist, but coming at it forty-plus years later it feels heavily overwritten, self-important, and ultimately ends up being a bit of a slog.

The project, however, is worth thinking about. While he describes it as "history as a nove...more

like · see review

Jul 27, 2011 Darran Mclaughlin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: american, fiction, history

I quite enjoyed this. The thing I like about Mailer is his unorthodoxy. He writes from the gut with seemingly no formal or aesthetic program. That is also his weakness. I enjoyed the portrait of Robert Lowell that is presented in this book. Mailer books often have a quote from Robert Lowell on the jacket or in the author information calling him 'the best journalist in America'. That's interesting because if you read this book you see that this praise is taken in an ironic, suspicious spirit, as...more

like · see review

Oct 30, 2011 Mrnotarides notarides rated it 4 of 5 stars

Mr. Mailer has fallen out of favor in recent years, but I do believe he is one of the great historians of the 20th century. History books can only tell you so much, but Mailer's intellect, combined with his talent make his taking on historical events worth reading. This books really explains the issues facing the country in the 1960's. We often get clean versions of history, but reading history from the perspective of as it is happening is something else. It is always so clear after the fact, bu...more

like · see review

Nov 10, 2012 Roberto rated it 3 of 5 stars

I still don't know what to make of this. On one hand Mailer is a pompous, macho prick, on the other he writes remarkably insightful stuff about people's motivations and behaviour, including his own, and he did appear in Gilmore Girls (cool points). On one hand he realises that writing a dry, neutral account of an event like the march to the Pentagon would not only have been boring but actually impossible, he then proceeds to do just that in the last segment before changing his mind halfway throu...more

like · see review

Jun 21, 2012 Phil Overeem rated it 4 of 5 stars

One of the first novel-length attempts at New Journalism. I liked it a lot. The first section is an account of Mailer's own involvement in the October 1967 March on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War (it's narrated in third-person as a nod to objectivity, but the approach also creates moments of self-effacing humor and skepticism that are among the reading highlights); the second leans on journalistic coverage of the event that provokes questions about what approach constitutes the greater...more

like · see review

Mar 06, 2012 Dirk rated it 4 of 5 stars

I nearly put the book down after two pages, thinking, Wow, Norman Mailer is REALLY into Norman Mailer. It made me wonder how many square feet his home had, to make room for an ego that outsized. Then I decided to buy into the concept of the book as a novel, and that made all the difference. Okay, so Norman Mailer may not be a warm and fuzzy protagonist, but damn is he ever smart. Plus, Armies provided a look into the Vietnam protest era that one is not likely to find anywhere else. So, for its r...more

like · see review

Aug 30, 2011 Bill rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

I read this book because it won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. I also thought that since Mailer was a novelist that this "History" might be more compelling than something written by a dry, academic historian. Well, I was very disappointed. Mailer's egomania is not nearly as charming or interesting as he believes it to be. For me, Mailer did not make a particularly good protagonist because I didn't really care for him and therefore was not all that concerned about what would happ...more

like · see review

Aug 06, 2011 Ted Burke rated it 3 of 5 stars

Anyone who has had difficulty with Norman Mailer's militant ego-- or just plain irritated with the prospect of a writer declaring himself the best scribe in the land simply because he was the only one with the temerity to reach for the crown vacated by Hemingway--won't find relief here in his award winning book "The Armies of the Night". Too bad for them, I say, because even though Mailer's self regard is legendary and obnoxious without redemption in lesser pundits, Mailer shrewdly uses the pers...more Anyone who has had difficulty with Norman Mailer's militant ego-- or just plain irritated with the prospect of a writer declaring himself the best scribe in the land simply because he was the only one with the temerity to reach for the crown vacated by Hemingway--won't find relief here in his award winning book "The Armies of the Night". Too bad for them, I say, because even though Mailer's self regard is legendary and obnoxious without redemption in lesser pundits, Mailer shrewdly uses the persona, the third person referenced "Mailer", to engage the the collision of forces that made up the political sensibility of the 60s ; the counter culture, anti-war activist, avowed Marxist revolutionaries, feminists, black nationalists , yippees, hippees, crazies of all sorts converged on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam and what was seen by many alternative life stylers as the fatally erring trajectory America had taken; all the sins of capitalism, white racism, imperialism and the like were now returning to the soil from which they came, demanding the bill be paid and the interest collected in full. Mailer, someone who had announced early in his career, in his introduction to "Advertisements for Myself", that he was obsessed with radically transforming the way his country came to see itself in the strange and terrifying world that was emerging in the post war period, comes off as the smartest guy in the room, someone conducting a running commentary on the tensions and contradictions that were coming from the estranged forces that composed the American Left. Much of the fun, though, certainly has to be the adventures of the swaggering, blustery, drinking and drunk Mailer as he wades through the issues and the worries that accompany movements that want to seize the future. There is an apt awareness of his own absurdity and celebrity, there is a realization that even his imagination cannot single handedly stop an a congery of policy evils already in place and being executed. What he could do, though, was maintain his sublime sense of irony and report, comment, opine and theorize with the quick witted verve that only the best stylists maintain. This is a worthy read, an important document from a period of American which to this day refuses to be understood in retrospect.(less)

like · see review

Feb 02, 2009 heather rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm all over this place about this book, which I started as the lovefest of Inaug. 2008 started. Hearing about locations I've seen all my life as the setting for massive protests and clashes felt superimposed on a situation not unlike America today, and yet radically different than America today. Mailer hates everybody, but it seems that maybe he wrote this to make sense out of a painful time in history and to document his opposition, and others', to Vietnam. I can't decided whether Mailer sees...more

like · see review

Dec 16, 2008 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: all-time-favorites, classics, history, memoir-biography, nonfiction-reference, read-when-young

This is the Mailer book that convinced me he was a genius. I would follow it with An American Dream and immediately ditch the idea of his genius, but when I read this book, at least, I thought he was on top of his game and writing like no one I'd ever seen before.

Of course, I was an ignorant reader. Hadn't yet read Wolfe (Tom), nor Hunter S. Thompson, nor Truman Capote, and the idea of a nonfiction novel struck me as wildly innovative. So I granted Mailer the swagger that kind of sucks this narr...more

like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 84 85 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend it | Stats | Recent status updates

combine
Other Editions (21)

More editions...

Genres

History

44 users

Non Fiction

33 users

Politics

18 users

Autobiography > Memoir

12 users

Literature

9 users

Classics

8 users

Writing > Journalism

6 users

Literature > American

5 users

War

5 users

History > American History

4 users

See top shelves...

Readers also enjoyed similar books

About Norman Mailer

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.

Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once....more

More about Norman Mailer...

Books by Norman Mailer

More…

Share This Book

Facebook Twitter Your website

Trivia About The Armies of the...

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

title link	preview: The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History
avg rating	preview: The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History Goodreads rating: 3.61 (1412 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12474.The_Armies_of_the_Night?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347787466l/12474.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12474.The_Armies_of_the_Night?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History by Norman Mailer[/url]

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

Friend Reviews

Community Reviews

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website