Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer (1968)
Norman Mailer himself gave evidence at the trial of the Chicago 7. And if you want to understand the riot itself, and the counterculture protests that swept America through the late 1960s, there is no better place to start than his trailblazing account of the year America went up in flames.
In early April, tens of thousands of hippies, Yippies, clergymen, intellectuals, celebrities, poets and pacifists flung themselves at the Democratic Convention in Chicago to protest against the Vietnam War. To them, the government was writing a cheque in young men's blood that the country couldn't afford.
But what began as a peaceful protest, quickly turned into several days of riots, police onslaughts, broken heads, broken windows, fire and fury.
And Mailer was there to document it all, just as had been a year earlier when up to 200,000 people attempted to storm the Pentagon in his era-defining The Armies of the Night. What emerged was a swaggering masterpiece of narrative non-fiction that would become the defining account of the Chicago riots of 1968.