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Norman Mailer: The Sixties (boxed set)

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

Edited by J. Michael Lennon

Fifty years after the turmoil of 1968, modern America’s most turbulent decade comes to life though the collected writings of its greatest literary provocateur

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News “A forceful style, an urgent style”: Norman Mailer at 100
February 6, 2023

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

Here, in a deluxe two-volume Library of America boxed set, are two novels, two book-length masterpieces of new journalism, and thirty-three essays.

Four Books of the 1960s presents An American Dream, Mailer’s hallucinatory voyage through the dark night of an America awash in money, sex, and violence; Why Are We in Vietnam?, in which a motor-mouthed 18-year-old Texan on the eve of military service recounts with manic and obscene exuberance a grizzly bear hunt in Alaska that exposes the macho roots of the war; and the acclaimed “non-fiction novel” The Armies of the Night (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award) and its follow-up Miami and the Siege of Chicago, on-the-scene/in-the-scene accounts of an antiwar march on the Pentagon and the party conventions of 1968. In these revolutionary books Mailer cast himself as a player in the drama he reports, bringing a sharp and merciless eye on the decade’s political upheavals.

In Collected Essays of the 1960s acclaimed Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon gathers for the first time all the essential essays from the classic collections The Presidential Papers (1963), Cannibals and Christians (1966), and Existential Errands (1972), each a fascinating window on one of the most extraordinary and tumultuous decades in the nation’s history. A self-appointed exorcist of the culture’s demons and an unrestrained mythologizer of his own identity, Mailer contemplated and often skewered icons of politics and literature, charted psychosexual undercurrents and covert power plays, and gloried in the exercise of a pugnacious prose style that was all his own. Whether writing about Jackie Kennedy or Sonny Liston, the realist tradition in America or the internal culture wars of the Republican Party, the death of Ernest Hemingway or the battle against censorship, Mailer was always ready to intervene in what he called “the years of the plague.”

Each 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 these volumes was provided by The Norman Mailer Society.
Table of Contents

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

Essays
Superman Comes to the Supermarket
An Open Letter to John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Fidel Castro
An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, or, The Wild West of the East
The Big Bite—November and December, 1962; January and March, 1963
The Debate with William Buckley—The Real Meaning of the Right Wing in America
Ten Thousand Words a Minute
Punching Papa: A Review of That Summer in Paris
Responses and Reactions II
The Big Bite—April, May, August, 1963
Some Children of the Goddess
A Television Show with Nelson Algren
The Leading Man: A Review of J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth
The Case Against McCarthy: A Review of The Group
A Statement for Architectural Forum
A Vote for Bobby K.
In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964
My Hope for America: A Review of a Book by Lyndon B. Johnson
A Piece for The New York Times
A Happy Solution to Vietnam: From a Partisan Review Symposium
Introducing Our Argument
The Argument Reinvigorated
Our Argument at Last Presented
The Playwright as Critic
The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer
The Saint and the Psychopath
Homage to El Loco
Up the Family Tree
An Open Letter to Richard Nixon
Looking for the Meat and Potatoes—Thoughts on Black Power
An Instrument for the City
Foreword to The End of Obscenity

Appendix
Prefaces to The Presidential Papers
A Prefatory Paper—Heroes and Leaders (1963)
Preface to the Bantam Paperback Edition (May 1964)
Preface to the Berkley Paperback Edition (October 1976)

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-557-0 1462 pages

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