Four Books of the 1960s: An American Dream / Why Are We in Vietnam? / The Armies of the Night / Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Library of America #305

by Norman Mailer, J. Michael Lennon (Editor)

No writer plunged more vigorously into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, fearlessly revolutionizing literary norms and genres to capture the decade’s political, social, and sexual explosions. Declaring himself to have “the mind of an outlaw,” he adhered closely to his own vision of what it meant to be a writer. In a way uniquely his own, he merged the public and the private, the personal and the political, taking risks with every sentence. Here, for the first time in a single volume, are four of his most extraordinary works.

War hero, television star, existential hipster, seducer, murderer: such is Stephen Rojack, the hero of An American Dream (1965), Mailer’s hallucinatory voyage through the dark night of an America awash in money, sex, and violence. Mailer challenged himself by serializing the book while he was still writing it, an approach he compared to “ten-second chess.” The result is a fever dream of a novel, navigating through the most extreme fears and fantasies of a culture hooked on power. In Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) a motor-mouthed eighteen-year-old Texan on the eve of military service recounts an exclusive grizzly bear hunt in Alaska with an obscene exuberance that finally comes close to horror. Although the word “Vietnam” appears only on the book’s final page, the whole work is imbued with a sense of frantic bloodthirstiness that exposes the macho roots of the war.

With the acclaimed “non-fiction novel” The Armies of the Night (1968), an account of the October 1967 anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon, Mailer brought a new approach to journalism, casting himself (“he would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast”) as a player in the drama as he reported, alongside a stunning gallery of student activists, politicians, intellectuals, and policemen. Winning both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, The Armies of the Night immediately established itself as an essential record of its moment.

In Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) Mailer continued his eyewitness chronicle of American political life, embedding himself at the 1968 Republican and Democratic presidential conventions and drawing unforgettable portraits of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, and many others. His reading of the nation’s political undercurrents continues to surprise with its relevance.

Genres: Novels, Literature, Fiction

937 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

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. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried. I'd liked The Executioner's Song when it came out the year I turned 18, reading.the paperback on long bus rides to and from my minimum wage dead-end job, through which Mailer's evocation of the flyover country and the limited prospects of the stagflation Seventies appeared relevant, even if from his Manhattan-Harvard-Beltway perch of privilege. And Ancient Evenings didn't deserve the lambasting, although it shares with American Dream (1965) here the excess of thanatos and eros...

Which I admit he can capture memorably in moments of frenzied reverie, chthonic rapture, primal screams, and messy lust. Allowing for a rather preposterous plot, too many main characters courting death on high-rise parapets (where I dwell on the second story, my apartment doesn't allow windows to open more than a few inches; insurance companies cracked down on suicidal tendencies since...) I wasn't swept into the incest, espionage hints, penthouse to pavement set-up, Mob-cop skullduggery yet the police interrogations rang true, despite Mailers tiresome fascination with the Magic Negro...

However, a few paragraphs of the hipster Why We Are in Vietnam sufficed. It hasn't dated well in its jive talk, satirical excoriation of rednecks, its slavering obsession with one of Mailer's signature sex scenarios, buggery, or its overwhelming reliance on cooler-than-thee cocksure machismo bluster. And by the way, it's a labored putdown of good-ol'-boys, not a treatise on the war. Clever marketing.

I wearied of The Armies of the Night about a protest on the Mall preceding a 1967 march to occupy the Pentagon. Like his reporting from the 1968 Miami GOP and Chicago Democratic party conventions, he plays himself as a third-person protagonist. He's onto what a jerk he can be, mocking his rude public image. In small excerpts this goes down easy, but hundreds of pages (much in this LoA anthology was originally serialized for East Coast bastions of monthly liberal thought, if subsequently revised) don't let a reader take a breather from bloated advertisements for himself (to adapt an aptly titled collection later in his long career). It's a useful curio of the era; scholar J. Michael Lennon annotates the often forgotten politicians, celebrities, and entertainers of postwar America, although certain entries beg the obvious. Still, such diligence documents how rapidly current events curdle into arcana or trivia.