Exhuming Mailer’s America

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.