Norman Mailer/Bert Stern. Marilyn Monroe

Fifty years after the turmoil of 1968, modern America's most turbulent decade comes to life though the collected writings of its greatest literary provocateur No writer plunged more wholeheartedly into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, as he fearlessly revolutionized literary norms and genres to capture the political, social, and sexual explosions of an unsettled era. Here, in a deluxe two-volume Library of America boxed set, are two novels, two booklength masterpieces of new journalism, and thirty-three essays. Four Books of the 1960s presents An American Dream, Mailer's hallucinatory voyage through the dark night of an America awash in money, sex, and violence; Why Are We in Vietnam?, in which a motor-mouthed 18-year-old Texan on the eve of military service recounts with manic and obscene exuberance a grizzly bear hunt in Alaska that exposes the macho roots of the war; and the acclaimed "non-fiction novel" The Armies of the Night (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award) and its follow-up Miami and the Siege of Chicago, on-the-scene/in-the-scene accounts of an antiwar march on the Pentagon and the party conventions of 1968. In these revolutionary books Mailer cast himself as a player in the drama he reports, bringing a sharp and merciless eye on the decade's political upheavals. In Collected Essays of the 1960s acclaimed Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon gathers for the first time all the essential essays from the classic collections The Presidential Papers (1963), Cannibals and Christians (1966), and Existential Errands (1972), each a fascinating window on one of the most extraordinary and tumultuous decades in the nation's history. A self-appointed exorcist of the culture's demons and an unrestrained mythologizer of his own identity, Mailer contemplated and often skewered icons of politics and literature, charted psychosexual undercurrents and covert power plays, and gloried in the exercise of a pugnacious prose style that was all his own. Whether writing about Jackie Kennedy or Sonny Liston, the realist tradition in America or the internal culture wars of the Republican Party, the death of Ernest Hemingway or the battle against censorship, Mailer was always ready to intervene in what he called "the years of the plague."