The Armies of the Night
by Norman Mailer
Summary
Norman Mailer went to Washington in October 1967 to take part in the march on the Pentagon protesting the Vietnam War, and instead of simply reporting on it, he wrote himself into the story as its central character, a device so unusual for a work of nonfiction that the book's two halves carry titles announcing exactly what he is doing: History as a Novel, followed by The Novel as History. In the first half, Mailer narrates his own weekend in the third person, as though watching another man named Mailer stumble through a drunken, self important speech at a pre march rally, get deliberately arrested crossing a police line at the Pentagon, and spend a night in jail turning the whole experience over in his mind.
The second half pulls back from Mailer's own story to reconstruct the march itself as history, following the demonstrators, the soldiers facing them, and the political currents that had brought both groups to that specific stretch of ground outside Washington on that particular weekend. Mailer treats his own vanity and self regard as material rather than something to hide, using his own ridiculousness as a way into a larger question about what it actually felt like to oppose the war in 1967, when protest was still finding its shape and its own participants were still working out what they believed they were doing.
The book began life as a single Harper's magazine piece so long it was, at the time, the longest article the magazine had ever run, and reading the expanded book means following prose that moves between comic self mockery and genuine political seriousness without much warning between the two. It suits a reader interested in the antiwar movement's early years told from inside one famously immodest participant's own head, in a style that helped define what critics later called the New Journalism.
Historical Context & Significance
The Armies of the Night shared the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction with René Dubos's So Human an Animal, and in the same year it also won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters, a rare double that marked it as one of the defining books of its moment. The book grew out of Mailer's Harper's magazine piece The Steps of the Pentagon, later expanded into the full length work published in 1968 by New American Library.
Critics received it with real enthusiasm even though it never became a mainstream bestseller, and it has stayed on lists of the best nonfiction of the twentieth century in the decades since, praised for a formal daring not many writers of the period were attempting. It also earned Mailer a George Polk Award, adding journalism's own honor to the two literary prizes and confirming the book's standing across both fields at once.