Norman Mailer: The 1960s Collection: A Library of America Boxed Set

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Four Mailer classics in one volume for the first time, books that crackle with the creative energy and raw passions of America's most turbulent decade. No writer plunged more wholeheartedly into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, as he fearlessly revolutionized literary norms and genres to capture the political, social, and sexual explosions of an unsettled era. Here, for the first time in one volume, are his unforgettable books of the 1960s- two disruptive and visionary novels, and two radically innovative journalistic masterpieces. War hero, television star, existential hipster, seducer, murderer- such is the protagonist of An American Dream, Mailer's hallucinatory voyage through the dark night of an America awash in money, sex, and violence. In Why Are We in Vietnam a motor-mouthed 18-year-old Texan on the eve of military service recounts with manic and obscene exuberance a grizzly bear hunt in Alaska that exposes the macho roots of the war. The acclaimed "non-fiction novel" The Armies of the Night (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award) and its follow-up Miami and the Siege of Chicago are on-the-scene, in-the-scene accounts of an antiwar march on the Pentagon and the party conventions of 1968, as Mailer casts himself as a player in the drama he reports, bringing a sharp and merciless eye on the decade's political upheavals.

Reviews

"Mailer is missed. . . . His gifts of observation and imagination [are] splendid armor for our own time." David Denby,Harper's Magazine

The fearlessly original Mailer is . . . more vital than ever. . . . If you really want to knowWhat Happened, this collection of 50-year-old works has more to say than anything published in the past 12 months. Ash Carter,Esquire

Mailers catalogue of the schizophrenic hypocrisies in American lifeour warring internal dualismsthat brought us to such a pass seem still entrenched in our political psyche. One cant help thinking that dissenting young people today, who might come upon this book as a historical curiosity or reading assignment, will be surprised to find a startlingly familiar nation at war with itself. Robert J. Begiebing,The Mailer Review

"His biographer J. Michael Lennon and the LOA selected the contents brilliantly."
Buffalo News

Norman Mailer is best binge-read as an orgy of big ideas, long, loping sentences and assertions that only a writer of titanic ego could make. Get ready to dive in...[this] two-volume anthology should keep you busy for days.
Dallas News

Author Bio

J. Michael Lennon emeritus professor of English at Wilkes University, is Norman Mailer's editor and biographer, and president of the Mailer Society. His books include Norman Mailer- A Double Life (2013) and Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014).