A 1968 book about a 1967 event
The book’s date needs clearing up at the outset. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History was published in 1968, not 1967. It first appeared in part in magazines early in the year and was published as a book that spring. The event it describes, the march on the Pentagon, took place on 21 October 1967. The book belongs here because it is the most famous record of that day and because it shows how one writer’s experience of 1967 became a lasting piece of literature.
The march itself
In the autumn of 1967 antiwar organisers, led by a coalition known as the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, called for a mass demonstration in Washington. The plan was to gather at the Lincoln Memorial and then cross the Potomac to the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Defense Department. Estimates of the crowd vary widely, but numbers in the tens of thousands are often quoted, with some accounts putting the total higher.
The day included a rally and speeches, then a march across the river to the Pentagon’s parking areas. Some demonstrators tried to reach the building itself, and confrontations with soldiers and federal marshals followed. Protesters placed flowers in rifle barrels in some well-known photographs. A group of activists, including the poet Allen Ginsberg, had announced a plan to “exorcise” the building. Hundreds of people were arrested, many after the main crowd had left and as the evening wore on. The wider context of the event, including the escalating Vietnam War and the draft, is covered in our article on the March on the Pentagon.
Mailer in the story
Norman Mailer was already well known as the author of The Naked and the Dead, a novel about the Second World War. In 1967 he was a prominent, combative public figure and an early critic of the Vietnam War. He agreed to take part in the march, in part at the urging of friends, and the book is the account of his two or three days in the thick of it.
Mailer made an unusual choice in writing about himself. He refers to the author as a character, using the third person, and he does so with a mixture of self-mockery and seriousness. The character is vain, funny, occasionally drunk and frequently ridiculous, and also earnest and brave. He gives a speech at a theatre in Washington the night before the march which reportedly did not go as planned, and he is arrested during the march. He spent a night in custody before being released and brought before a court.
Among the other real people who appear in the book are the poet Robert Lowell, the critic Dwight Macdonald and the writer Paul Goodman, along with various activists and organisers. They are drawn with the same sharp, affectionate and sometimes unflattering pen.
History as a novel, the novel as history
The book is divided into two parts. The first, “History as a Novel”, is a personal narrative of Mailer’s experiences, told with the devices of fiction. The second, “The Novel as History”, attempts a more conventional reconstruction of the march and the surrounding events, drawing on a range of sources. The subtitle sets out the basic idea: that a subjective, novelistic approach might reach some truths about a historical event that straight reporting could not, and that an objective account might nonetheless need the shaping tools of fiction.
For this reason the book is often listed among the key texts of the New Journalism, the mid-1960s movement in which writers like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Truman Capote used novelistic techniques for nonfiction. Mailer’s work differs from some of the others in how forcefully he puts himself at the centre. It is also more openly political, and it takes a measured view of the antiwar movement’s strengths and flaws, noting the contrast between the middle-class protesters and the young soldiers who confronted them. The book cannot be taken as a neutral record, which Mailer would not have claimed it to be.
Reception and recognition
The book was widely and generally warmly reviewed. It received both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award in 1969, which was striking for a work that so openly blended fiction and fact. It is still frequently read as an example of how to write about history from inside it.
Beyond the book’s literary reputation, it offers something useful to historians. The mood of the autumn of 1967 is hard to recover from numbers alone. Mailer captures the strange mixture of festival and confrontation, the divisions between older liberals and the young radicals of the New Left, and the sense that the antiwar movement was moving from petition and protest toward something harder to control. Details should be checked against other sources, since memory, style and showmanship all shape his version, but the book remains one of the liveliest windows onto its subject.