A Writer's Diary: Mailer Sees Mailer as Book Character for his 'Armies'
John Barkham's interview in which Mailer explains arriving at the third-person 'Mailer' of The Armies of the Night.
An article-interview by John Barkham. Mailer, tired of “the Mailer legend, which has me as a cross between Ernest Hemingway and a dinosaur,” explains the technical problem of the March on the Pentagon (no figures equivalent to JFK or Goldwater) and how he arrived at the third person for The Armies of the Night: “I tried the third person, wrote a few pages quickly, read it over, and had a great revulsion,” then, a week later, “it looked more or less possible, so I kept going in this vein.”