Why Are We in Vietnam: A Novel

G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1967. First Edition. Hardcover. Near Fine. 208 pages. A novel about a hunting trip to Alaska. First edition (first printing); without the dedication page. A fine copy in a somewhat scuffed dust jacket with light chipping to the spine head. With a warm inscription by the author on the front free endpaper: 'To Don Kaufmann / with recollection of the fine and hungover morning we left Anchorage with [future Poet Laureate of Florida] Ed Skellings and flew over (or under) Mt. McKinley on our way to Fairbanks. Next night a debate with Ralph Ellison at the University of Alaska and sensations of magnetic north being near indeed. Norman Mailer / Sept. '75, Maine.' Forty-two years later, upon Mailer's death, Kaufmann wrote about this 1965 plane ride during what would be Mailer's first and only trip to Alaska in a memoriam titled 'Norman Mailer in 'God's Attic,'' which described Mailer's request to the pilot to buzz the top of McKinley, which he did, repeatedly. Kaufmann wrote, 'During that twenty-minute hello to Denali, I could not foresee Mailer's next novel, Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), oddly entitled because the word "Vietnam" appears but once-in the book's final phrase, "Vietnam, hot dam." Most of the novel's "hot dams" took place in Alaska and mostly in remote, stark wilderness-the Brooks Range.' Kaufmann published his critical study of Mailer, Norman Mailer: The Countdown (The First Twenty Years) in 1969.