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  • Published: 15 July 2016
  • ISBN: 9780399588334
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $40.00

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968




Available for the first time in a Random House trade paperback edition and perfectly timed to tie in to the 2016 political conventions.

In this landmark work of journalism, Norman Mailer reports on the presidential conventions of 1968, the turbulent year from which today’s bitterly divided country arose. The Vietnam War was raging; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy had just been assassinated. In August, the Republican Party met in Miami and picked Richard Nixon as its candidate, to little fanfare. But when the Democrats backed Lyndon Johnson’s ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the city of Chicago erupted. Antiwar protesters filled the streets and the police ran amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike, all broadcast on live television—and captured in these pages by one of America’s fiercest intellects.
 
Praise for Miami and the Siege of Chicago
 
“For historians who wish for the presence of a world-class literary witness at crucial moments in history, Mailer in Miami and Chicago was heaven-sent.”—Michael Beschloss, The Washington Post
 
“Extraordinary . . . Mailer [predicted that] ‘we will be fighting for forty years.’ He got that right, among many other things.”—Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic
 
“Often reads like a good, old-fashioned novel in which suspense, character, plot revelations, and pungently describable action abound.”—The New York Review of Books
 
“[A] masterful account . . . To understand 1968, you must read Mailer.”—Chicago Tribune

  • Published: 15 July 2016
  • ISBN: 9780399588334
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $40.00

About the author

Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer was born in New Jersey in January 1923 and after graduating from Harvard, served in the US army from 1944-1946. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published to immediate critical acclaim in 1948 - and has been hailed as 'the best war novel to emerge from the United States' (Anthony Burgess).

He has subsequently published both fiction and non-fiction and his books include Barbary Shore (1951), Advertisements for Myself (1959), The Presidential Papers (1963), An American Dream (1964), Armies of the Night (1968), Ancient Evenings (1983), and Tough Guys Don't Dance (1983).

The Executioner's Song, first published in 1979, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 - an award which Mailer has won twice during his writing career.

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and went to Harvard when he was sixteen. He majored in engineering, but it was while he was at university that he became interested in writing; he published his first story when he was eighteen. After graduating he served during the war in the Philippines with the Twelfth Armoured Cavalry regiment from Texas; those were the years that formed The Naked and the Dead (1948). His other books include Barbary Shore (1951), The Deer Park (1955), Advertisements for Myself (1959), Deaths for the Ladies, a volume of poetry (1962), The Presidential Papers (1963), An American Dream (1964), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), The Armies of the Night (1968), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), A Fire on the Moon (1970), The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Marilyn (1973), Some Honourable Men (1976), Genius and Lust - A Journey Through the Writings of Henry Miller (1976), A Transit to Narcissus (1978), The Executioner's Song (1979) and Tough Guys Don't Dance (1983). The Deer Park has been adapted into a play and was successfully profuced off Broadway. He also directed four films.

In 1955 Norman Mailer co-founded the Village Voice, and he was the editor of Dissent from 1952 until 1963. For his part in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam he was gaoled in 1967. He was President of PEN (US chapter) from 1984 to 1986 and was winner of the National Book Award for Arts and Letters in 1969 and of the Pulitzer Prize twice, once in 1969 and again in 1980.

Norman Mailer was married six times and had nine children. He died in November 2007.

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