Ten top Norman Mailer books

J. Michael Lennon is the late Norman Mailer’s archivist and authorized biographer. His new book is Norman Mailer: A Double Life.

For Publishers Weekly, Lennon named his picks for the ten best Mailer books. One title on the list:

The Armies of the Night

Describing himself in the third person, Mailer draws on the techniques of the novelist, the journalist, and the historian to depict a divided nation. Generally considered to be one of the glories of the New Journalism, the narrative is a sharply observed account of the October 1967 anti-Vietnam War March on the Pentagon, the culmination of three days of protest in the nation’s capital. Mailer, the half-comic, half-heroic protagonist, was arrested and jailed for his part in the March. Armies also contains a brilliant portrait of poet Robert Lowell, Don Quixote to Mailer’s Sancho Panza. The book won both a Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue