The work was designed to commemorate both the fiftieth anniversary of The Naked and the Dead (1948), and Mailer's seventy-fifth birthday.

Norman Mailer edited the anthology himself, choosing to organize the content not by the chronology in which the pieces are written, but the chronology of the events that the works describe; some of the excerpts are written in the midst of the action, while others may come upon forty years of reflection.

Selected texts that deal with the ancient world, however, appear out of sequence at the end of the volume.

Excerpts from Mailer's most notable works, including The Naked and the Dead, Advertisements for Myself (1959), "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (1960), The Armies of the Night (1968), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), and The Executioner's Song (1979), as well as several works in their entirety, including "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" (1957), "The Time of Her Time" (1959), and various transcribed and annotated interviews with the likes of William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal, Kate Millett, and John Ehrlichman.

[1] Mailer endeavored to produce not an anthology, but a book that offers "some hint at a social and cultural history over these last fifty years."