![]() ![]() Page after page you have the impression that he is commenting not on Lyndon Johnson's shameful war, but George Bush's corporate-powered skulking towards another self-serving war. It was mesmerising, and to re-read it today is to experience an additional punch: the one that verifies that history repeats itself as (malignant) farce. “Some time in 1969 in Paris, I first read Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer's account of the anti-Vietnam war march on the Pentagon. “Only a writer steeped in American life, with all his wits about him, and with a genuinely compassionate social vision, could have produced a work so acute in its historical insights and so moving in its portraits of contemporaries.”- The Nation “His genuine wit and bellicose charm, and his fervent and intense sense of legitimately caring, render The Armies of the Night an artful document, worthy to be judged as literature.”- Time ![]() Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. He is the author of more than thirty books. Born in Long Branch, NJ, in 1923, and raised in Brooklyn, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the 20th century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. ![]()
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