Journalism as Literature: "The Armies of the Night," by Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer arrived on the literary scene with a bang. His war novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) was a huge success and marked him out as one of the stars of a new generation of post-war (male) writers, a generation that included Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, James Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. After that strong beginning, however, Mailer’s next novels were less well received, and by 1967 one might even say that his reputation was in decline. He announced that there was a general “crisis of the novel,” and decided to do something radically different. Taking as his subject an early anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington D.C., a “march on the Pentagon,” and placing himself, in the third person, squarely in the center of his narrative, he wrote a text that was part-journalism, part-autobiography, part-fiction, part rhapsodic meditation on the nature of America, writing history as a novel, he said, but also a novel as history. This was the extraordinary The Armies of the Night, which reinvigorated his career.

Norman Mailer in 2006