Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Fifty years after the March on the
Pentagon Norman Mailer's seminal tour de force remains as urgent and incisive as ever. Winner
of America's two highest literary awards The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably
captures the Sixties' tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his
peak. The time is October 21 1967. The place is Washington D.C. Depending on the paper you
read 20 000 to 200 000 protestors are marching to end the war in Vietnam while helicopters
hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon
steps. Among the marchers is a writer named Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation
in the day's events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that
shatters the mold of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies clergymen and cops
poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of
fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth. [Mailer's] genuine wit and
bellicose charm and his fervent and intense sense of legitimately caring render The Armies of
the Night an artful document worthy to be judged as literature.-Time Only a born novelist
could have written a piece of history so intelligent mischievous penetrating and
alive.-Alfred Kazin The New York Times Book Review
