The Armies of the Night

In 1948 The Naked and the Dead was published. Since then Norman Mailer has entertained enraged, and diverted us with a body of work more provocative than that of any other American writer.

Now, twenty years later, almost to the day, Mailer has finished another book about another kind of war, a book we believe will prove as important as The Naked and the Dead. The Armies of the Night (a title suggested to Mailer by Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach) chronicles the author's adventures over the four days of the October 1967 anti-Vietnam demonstrations in Washington, and then returns to the same ground for an objective history of the battle of the Pentagon, establishing in the process a fascinating entrance into that mysterious unexplored land between the material of a novel and the material of a history.