In October 1967, tens of thousands of people descended on Washington to protest the Vietnam War. One of them was controversial literary figure Norman Mailer, who would immortalize the March on the Pentagon—then the largest peace demonstration ever documented—in his “nonfiction novel” The Armies of the Night (1968). He wasn’t the only literary protester, of course: Robert Lowell was there, and so was Allen Ginsberg, who notoriously planned to “levitate” the Pentagon by means of meditation. (It didn’t happen.)
On Saturday, October 21, the antiwar demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, and after a series of speeches, began to march over the Memorial Bridge, toward the Pentagon (or rather, a designated nearby parking lot). Eventually, they were met with military police brandishing bayonets.
“Here was where the officially choreographed ‘resistance’ was supposed to take place,” historian Maurice Isserman told the New York Times some 50 years after the fact. “Protesters would have the option of crossing a police line, and then submitting to arrest in orderly fashion. Everyone else would content themselves staying within shouting (or levitating) distance.”
By 5pm, the arrests had begun; Mailer was arrested for civil disobedience, and spent the night in a jail cell in Occoquan, Virginia, with many other protesters (including Noam Chomsky).
The next year, Mailer published The Armies of the Night, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The book is an expansion of a long essay Mailer originally published about the event in Harper’s Magazine, which one contemporary reviewer described as “an orgy of self-flagellation and self-exaltation, with the one and the other glowing intertwined in a kind of frenzied chromosomal spindle… the ultimate realization of Mailer's one great talent—masturbation—the quintessence of self-love and self-debasement.”
On the other hand, Alfred Kazin called The Armies of the Night “a piece of history so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive, so vivid with crowds, the great stage that is American democracy… a work of personal and political reportage that brings to the inner and developing crisis of the United States at this moment admirable sensibilities, candid intelligence, the most moving concern for America itself.” Perhaps, as with many things Mailer, both can be true at once.