The Armies of the Night
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Armies of the Night is a nonfiction novel written by Norman Mailer and published by New American Library in 1968. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction and the National Book Award in category Arts and Letters.
The book's full title is Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History. Mailer essentially created his own genre; as the subtitle suggests, the narrative is split into historicized and novelized accounts of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. Mailer's unique rendition of the non-fiction novel was one of only a few at the time, and received the most critical attention. In Cold Blood (1965) by Truman Capote and Hell's Angels (1966) by Hunter S. Thompson had already been published, and three months later Tom Wolfe would contribute The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).