The Armies of the Night

324 Pages·1968·38.6 MB·English

by  Mailer Norman

The Armtes
THE NOVEL AS HISTORY
/•'"^it^
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND
THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

NORMAN MAILER
took part in the October 1967 anti-
Vietnam march to the Pentagon and
was arrested. After his release, he
came home to write about the anger,
the hangOTers, the obscenities, the
gams, the hippies, the bewildered
yonng MP^s, the dead-eyed marshals,
poets, chaplains, draft-card burners,
the walls of the Pentagon, and
NORMAN MAILER.
He has chronicled another kind of
war^ in a hook that is even greater than
his first novels The Naked and the
Dead.
**The Armies of the Night is witness to a victory
Here, in this extraordinarybook ... all the
. . .
facets of Norman Mailer, man and artist, settle
momentarily into place; and we sense, as he senses
perhaps for the first time. Mailer whole and in
place."
Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times
"Only a writer steeped in American life, with all
his wits about him, and with a genuinely com-
passionate social vision, could have produced a
work so acute in its historical insigjits and so
moving in its portraits of contemporaries."
The Nation
"He is funnier and more devastating on the sub-
ject of his vanity than anybody else will ever be.
Can we grayer souls quite laugh away Mail-
. . .
er's magnificently arrogant claim 3iat he is our
holy fool, our stand-up tragicomedian, the spokes-
man for the absurd and the apocalyptic?" Life
other Norman Mailer Titles
in SIGNET Editions
n EXISTENTIAL ERRANDS (#E5422—$1.75)
—
n THE NAKED AND THE DEAD (#E7604 $2.25)
D MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO: An Informal
History of the Republican and Democra—tic Con-
ventions of 1968 (#J7310 $1.95)
n OF A FIRE ON THE MOON (#E4765—$1.75)
n THE PRISONER OF SEX (#Y4822—$1.25)
THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, INC,
P.O. Box999, Bergenfield, NewJersey 07621
Please send me the SIGNET BOOKS I have checked ab—ove.
am enclosing $ (check or money order no
I
currency or C.O.D.'s). Please include the list price plus 35C a
copytocover handling and mailingcosts. (Pricesand numbers
are subject to change without notice.)
AddresSu.
Crty__-_ State Zip Code_
Allow atleast4weeks fordejivery
Norman
Mailer
THE ARMIES
OF THE NIGHT
History as a Novel
The Novel as History
A SIGNET BOOK 6t>m
©
Copyright 1968 by Norman Mailer
AU rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced without written
permission from the publishers.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-23406
Portions of this book were originally published in
Harper'sMagazine,
"A Shaky Start," on pages 13 and 14, reprinted by permission
from Time, The; Weekly Newsmagazine;
©
Copyright Time Inc., 1967.
Material on pages 58, 59, and 144fromNear the Ocean
by Robert Lowell.
Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
©
Copyright 1967 by Robert LowelL
Article quoted on pages 313-315 reprinted by permission.
©
Copyright 1967 by The Washington Star,
This is a reprint of a hardcover edition published by
The New American Library, Inc.
The hardcover edition was published simultaneously in Canada
by General Publishing Company, Ltd.
SIGNET TBADEMAEK BEG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOBHIGN OOONTBIBS
BBGISTERED TRADEMAEK MABOA BEQISTBADA
BBOBO EN OHIOAGO, U.S.A.
Signet, Signet Classics, Mentor, Plume andMeridianBooks
are published by The New American Library, Inc.,
1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019
First Printing, December, 1968
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
printed in the united states of AMERICA
To Beverly
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2010
http://www.archive.org/details/armiesofnighthismaiOOmail
An
acknowledgment to Sandy Charlebois
for work beyond the call of duty