“... The night​ before the midterms, I reread The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer’s account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon. ‘Brood on that country who expresses our will,’ Mailer wrote:She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin ...”

“... encouraged by the stunningly successful debuts of some of Vonnegut’s contemporaries, notably Mailer with The Naked and the Dead, Jones with From Here to Eternity and Heller with Catch 22). After a conventionally modest beginning with the hardback-only Player Piano Vonnegut became a writer of original paperback fiction: a format which in those days ...”