The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Exhuming Mailer’s America
| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 2 Number 1 • 2008 • In Memorium: Norman Mailer: 1923–2007 | » |
Written by
K. D. Norris
Abstract: The first book of The Armies of the Night, “History as a Novel,” is a personal account of Mailer’s involvement in the protest as part of a platoon of American social leaders and literati, including Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Spock, Robert Lowell, Paul Goodman, Marcus Raskin, and Dwight McDonald. Through Mailer’s eyes, but told in a masterfully unsettling third-person perspective viewing everything, including the character of Mailer, we are swept up by the ethos and bounce off the egos of the protesters. For the first time, for some readers, many of these historic counterculture figures are given flesh and blood, if not realism.
URL: https://prmlr.us/mr08norr
K. D. Norris
Abstract: The first book of The Armies of the Night, “History as a Novel,” is a personal account of Mailer’s involvement in the protest as part of a platoon of American social leaders and literati, including Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Spock, Robert Lowell, Paul Goodman, Marcus Raskin, and Dwight McDonald. Through Mailer’s eyes, but told in a masterfully unsettling third-person perspective viewing everything, including the character of Mailer, we are swept up by the ethos and bounce off the egos of the protesters. For the first time, for some readers, many of these historic counterculture figures are given flesh and blood, if not realism.
URL: https://prmlr.us/mr08norr
Works Cited
- Gilman, Richard (8 June 1968). "What Mailer Has Done". The New Republic. Books and the Arts. pp. 27–31.
- Mailer, Norman (1968). The Armies of the Night. New York: NAL.
