There was entertainment at the Republican Gala on Sunday night. The climax was a full marching band of bagpipers. They must have been hired for the week since one kept hearing them on the following days, and at all odd times, heard them even in my hotel room at four a.m. for a few were marching in the streets of San Francisco, sounding through the night, giving off the barbaric evocation of the Scots, all valor, wrath, firmitude, and treachery—the wild complete treachery of the Scots finding its way into the sound of the pipes. They were a warning of the fever in the heart of the Wasp. In the summer of 1964, Esquire sent celebrated writer Norman Mailer to San Francisco to cover the Republican National Convention, where ultra-conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was expected to take the Presidential nomination. Acerbic, unrelenting, and as sweeping in scope as it is deep in examination, In the Red Light firmly establishes Mailer as the leading literary social critic of his time—and, perhaps, of any time. In the Red Light was originally published in Esquire, November 1964. Cover design by Adil Dara.
Author
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
