The Armies of the Night: Reception and Prizes
A survey of the reception of The Armies of the Night — the near-unanimous praise led by Alfred Kazin's front-page New York Times Book Review notice, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and the book's enduring standing as a landmark of the New Journalism.
A companion to the Work page for The Armies of the Night (68.8). After two decades in which Mailer’s books were as often attacked as praised, Armies drew nearly unanimous acclaim and swept the major prizes.
The reviews
The notices were prominent and, unusually for Mailer, overwhelmingly favorable. Alfred Kazin’s “The Trouble He’s Seen” led the New York Times Book Review on the front page (5 May 1968). Richard Gilman (“What Mailer Has Done,” New Republic, 8 June), Conor Cruise O’Brien (“Confessions of the Last American,” New York Review of Books, 20 June), Alan Trachtenberg (The Nation, 28 May), and A. Alvarez (“Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye,” New Statesman, 20 September) were strongly positive; even Granville Hicks, a habitual detractor, warmed to it. Dissents came from Mario Puzo (“Generalissimo Mailer,” Chicago Tribune Book World, 28 April) and John Simon (“Mailer on the March,” Hudson Review). The New York Times Book Review of 23 June carried a full-page advertisement of twenty excerpted plaudits.
Prizes
The Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the National Book Award for arts and letters, both in 1969, as well as the George Polk Memorial Award for magazine reporting. The wins marked Mailer’s full critical rehabilitation and confirmed nonfiction narrative as his major mode.
Critical afterlife
The book became a fixture in the study of the New Journalism and the nonfiction novel — treated at length by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson’s anthology The New Journalism (1973), John Hellmann’s Fables of Fact (1981), Barbara Lounsberry’s The Art of Fact (1990), and Mailer scholars from Robert Begiebing and Joseph Wenke to Morris Dickstein and Louis Menand. J. Michael Lennon treats its composition and reception in Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013), 381–94.