This is Norman Mailer's "History as a Novel, The Novel as History," account of his participation in the October 1967 march on the Pentagon. Mailer was among the first of hundreds who attempted to break through police lines surrounding the entrances to the Pentagon and were subsequently arrested and thrown in jail. Mailer had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam and was willing to use his celebrated name to lend weight to causes that denounced U.S. involvement overseas. A few years earlier, Mailer, along with Allen Ginsberg, had testified in court to the artistic merits of William Burrough's novel Naked Lunch, during that novel's obscenity trial.
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