In the late 60's and early 70's, Norman Mailer was a regular on TV talk shows like The Tonight Show , The *** Cavett Show , and Firing Line , where he and Bill Buckley seemed to intensify each other's stutters. I never really liked Mailer's public persona — brash, swaggering, misogynist — and I could never imagine him actually writing, and taking the time to polish sentences. I am certain that the first Mailer book I read was The Armies of the Night (1968), his famous "History as a Novel; the Novel as History." (The paperback was published December 1968, and my copy says "Third printing," so I probably bought it in 1969.) The Armies of the Night is about the October 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon, in which a character named Norman Mailer — like Caesar, Mailer wrote of himself in the third person — takes center stage. All right, let us look into his mind. It has been burned out by the gouts of bourbon he has taken into himself the night before (in fact, one Read More...