68.25

Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968. New York: World, 24 October; simultaneously as a softcover: New York: New American Library; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, November or December, with different subtitle: An Informal History of the American Political Conventions of 1968. Nonfiction narrative, 223 pp., $5.95.

Dedication: “To my Father.” Nominated for the National Book Award in the history and biography category. Rpt: 68.27, 76.5, 98.7 (partial). See 68.18, 69.3, 72.7.

“ . . . you end up writing best about those historic events which have a magnetic relation to your own ideas and tend to write less well about situations where that doesn’t occur. I think, for example, Miami and the Siege of Chicago is probably a better book than St. George and the Godfather. For a number of reasons including the fact that the conventions themselves were more exciting, but also because there was a polarity in ’68 more congenial to me than in ’72. ” — Mailer, 75.11

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Bibliography

Reviews

• Buckley, Priscilla L. (February 11, 1969). "Seeing It like Mailer Does". National Review. pp. 129–130. Negative.
• Fremont-Smith, Eliot (October 28, 1968). "Family Report". New York Times. Positive.
• Fuller, Edmund (December 20, 1968). "Review of Miami and the Siege of Chicago". Wall Street Journal. p. 14. Positive.
• Richardson, Jack (May 8, 1969). "The Aesthetics of Norman Mailer". New York Review of Books. pp. 8–9. Positive. Rpt: Lucid (1971), Bloom (1986).
• Shaw, Peter (December 1968). "The Conventions, 1968". Commentary. pp. 93–96. Positive.
• Sheed, Wilfred (December 6, 1968). "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: A Review". New York Times Book Review. pp. 3, 56. Mixed.

Essays

• Bailey, Jennifer (1979). "The Novelist versus the Reporter". Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist. New York: Harper & Row. pp. 101–113.
• Braudy, Leo (1972). "Norman Mailer: The Pride of Vulnerability". In Braudy, Leo. Norman Mailer: a Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. pp. 1–20.
• Hitchens, Christopher (2008). "Norman Mailer: Miami and the Siege of Chicago". Mailer Review. 2: 264–269.
• Leeds, Barry H. (1969). The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer. New York: NYU Press.
• Rich, Frank (2008). "Introduction". Miami and the Siege of Chicago. New York: New York Review Books. pp. vii–xi.
• Wenke, Joseph (2014) [1987]. "Mailer's Nonfiction (1968–72): The View of the Outsider". Mailer's America. Hanover, NH; London: University Press of New England for University of Connecticut. pp. 167–177. ISBN 0874513936.