Mr. Mailer Goes to Washington: The Armies of the Night Fifty Years On
David Denby's essay-review occasioned by the Library of America's 2018 Mailer volumes, rereading The Armies of the Night fifty years on and finding in Mailer's 1968 portrait of the US Marshals at the Pentagon a prophecy of 'Trump-voters-before-Trump.'
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David Denby‘s Harper’s essay-review, occasioned by the Library of America‘s 2018 reissue of Mailer’s 1960s work (especially Four Books of the 1960s). Rereading The Armies of the Night fifty years after the 1967 March on the Pentagon, Denby finds Mailer’s bitter 1968 portrait of the Southern US Marshals — “the hatred of failures who had not lost their greed” — “the best description of a certain kind of Trump voter ever written… and written fifty years before the fact.” He reads Armies as “a great garrulous American book that comes within hailing distance of Whitman’s poetry,” in which Mailer “perceived something new, a widening divide… After fifty years, his work remains entirely contemporary.”