Frank Rich: How to Cover an Election

When, in the summer of 1968, Norman Mailer covered the Republican and Democratic conventions on assignment for Harper's magazine, he was forty-five, an aging rebel looking for a new cause. He had started to drift restlessly from his single-minded pursuit of the Great American Novel into filmmaking and journalism, two callings that were also in the throes of seismic generational change.

Mailer juggled his reporting forays to Miami and Chicago with the shooting of Maidstone, his most ambitious contribution to the new wave of American independent cinema. Miami and the Siege of Chicago, meanwhile, was his latest contribution to a literary revolution that had been fomented throughout the decade by a pair of iconoclastic magazine editors, Harold Hayes of Esquire and Willie Morris of Harper's. Mailer's take on the 1960 Democratic convention for Esquire, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," had been an early salvo. By 1968, Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's Angels), and, at The New Yorker, Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) had created nonfiction "novels" that upended the staid conventions of newspaper and magazine writing by injecting strong subjective voices, self-reflection, opinion, and, most of all, good writing that animated current events and the characters who populated them. Mailer's book-length recounting of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night (subtitled History as a Novel, The Novel as History), had arguably been his most well-received venture since The Naked and the Dead. His book Miami and the Siege of Chicago was its eagerly awaited sequel.