Back Four Books of the 1960s

Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s

An American Dream | Why Are We in Vietnam? | The Armies of the Night | Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Edited by J. Michael Lennon

“Mailer perceived something new, a widening divide: ‘The two halves of America were not coming together, and when they failed to touch, all of history might be lost in the divide.’ He anticipated the current contempt shooting across class, regional, and cultural lines, and he made a brave effort to understand it. After fifty years, his work remains entirely contemporary.”—David Denby, Harper’s

Overview

Overview

Interviews J. Michael Lennon: Norman Mailer “recognized the permanent cleft in the American character”
April 11, 2018

Save $20 when you buy both volumes of Norman Mailer’s writings from the Sixties in a deluxe boxed set.

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.

J. Michael Lennon, editor, emeritus professor of English at Wilkes University, is Norman Mailer’s archivist, editor, and authorized biographer, and president of the Norman Mailer Society. His books include Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013) and Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014).

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Norman Mailer Society.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.

33.75 List Price: $45.00 (Save: 25%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #203192

ISBN: 978-1-59853-558-7 937 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 305 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

James Baldwin: Collected Essays LOA N°98

War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar & Peace Writing LOA N°278

Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s LOA N°246

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.