An American Dream is a 1965 novel by American author Norman Mailer. It was published by Dial Press. Mailer wrote it in serialized form for Esquire, consciously attempting to resurrect the methodology used by Charles Dickens and other earlier novelists, with Mailer writing each chapter against monthly deadlines. The book is written in a poetic style heavy with metaphor that creates unique and hypnotising narrative and dialogue. The novel's action takes place over 32 hours in the life of its protagonist Stephen Rojack.[3] Rojack is a decorated war-hero, former congressman, talk-show host, and university professor. He is depicted as the metaphorical embodiment of the American Dream.
In 1963, Mailer wrote two regular columns: one on religion called "Responses and Reactions" for Commentary and one called "Big Bite" for Esquire. Mailer also divorced from his third wife Jeanne Campbell and met Beverly Bentley who would become his fourth wife. Bentley had known Hemingway in Spain and briefly dated Miles Davis in New York before she met Mailer. Bentley and Mailer took a long car trip, notably visited an army buddy "Fig" Gwaltney in Arkansas, viewed an autopsy of a cancer victim, watched the Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson fight in Las Vegas, and spent time with the Beats in San Francisco.[4] While in San Francisco, Mailer "walked narrow ledges, testing his nerve and balance".[5] They spent several days in Georgia with Bentley's family, and returned to New York in August, with Bentley several months pregnant. Mailer officially divorced Campbell, after he and Bentley were married. These experiences, states Lennon, are reflected in An American Dream which Mailer began in September.[6]
Mailer's has similarities with Rojack: They both attended Harvard, served in World War II, had an interest in political office, and appeared on talk shows. Mailer seems to have drawn on his stabbing his second wife Adele Morales in Rojack's murdering of his wife Deborah.[7] Mailer did not deny these similarities, but stated:
Rojack is still considerably different from me — he's more elegant, more witty, more heroic, his physical strength is considerable, and at the same time he's more corrupt than me. I wanted to create a man who was larger than myself yet somewhat less successful. That way, ideally, his psychic density, if I may use a private phrase, would be equal to mine — and so I could write from within his head with comfort.[8][lower-alpha 1]
After a cross-country trip and having little success with his "big novel", Mailer approached the editor of Esquire with an idea that would make him produce a short novel: He would write eight 10,000-word installments that would run from January to August 1964.[6] The editor agreed, and Mailer announced the novel in his last "Big Bite" column.[9]
Major characters
Stephen Rojack: The novel's protagonist, a WWII hero, politician, academic, and public figure, Rojack experiences an existential crisis early in the novel.
Cherry: Shago's girlfriend with ties to organized crime, Cherry becomes Rojack's love interest.
Deborah Kelly: Rojack's wife and daughter of Barney Kelly.
Barney Kelly: The father of Deborah Kelly
Shago Martin: A jazz musician and Cherry's boyfriend.
Roberts: A police detective who interrogates Rojack.
Ruta: Deborah’s maid and Kelly's spy.
Synopsis
In an alcoholic rage, Rojack murders his estranged wife, a high society woman, and descends into a lurid underworld of Manhattan jazz clubs, bars, and Mafia intrigue after meeting Cherry Melanie, a night-club singer and the girlfriend of a highly placed mobster. Rojack makes the death appear as a suicide, and maintains his innocence no matter how intense the scrutiny or severe the consequences. Rojack feels liberated by the violence and imagines himself receiving messages from the Moon, perceiving voices that command him to deny his guilt. In the course of the next twenty four hours, Rojack sets his focus against the New York City Police Department, the intimidation of an erratic black entertainer who draws a knife on him, and the gathered political clout of his dead wife's father, Barney Oswald Kelly, who suggests that higher political sources have an interest in Rojack's fate.
Chapter summaries
The Harbours of the Moon
Rojack vomits over the balcony at a party and considers suicide. He leaves the party and calls his estranged wife Deborah, going to her house after she invites him. Ruta, the maid, lets him in. He notices that Deborah has been drinking. She belittles him in his time of need, and he strangles her on the floor.
A Runner from the Gaming Room
Rojack has sex with Ruta in her room. He then returns to Deborah's room, cleans up the evidence of murder, then throws her over the balcony making her death appear as a suicide. He tells Ruta that Mrs. Rojack killed herself.
A Messenger from the Maniac
Rojack asks Ruta to tell the cops nothing about their encounter. He runs to the street and sees Cherry Melanie, the night club singer, for the first time. He meets Detective Roberts at the scene of the "suicide." Depicted is Deborah's body smashed from impact and hit by a car. They go back upstairs, and Rojack fabricates a story about Deborah having cancer as the cause of her suicide. The police insist that Rojack come downtown for questioning. They meet Lt. Leznicki on the way out. Leznicki and O'Brien badger Rojack on the way to the police department. Rojack learns that one of the cars in the pile-up caused by Deborah was Eddie Ganucci, a mob boss wanted on a subpoena. Later Rojack sees Cherry again. He is drawn to her. It turns out that Deborah actually did have cancer so they release Rojack. Rojack goes to the club where Cherry performs in Greenwich Village.
Green Circles of Exhaustion
Rojack sits at the bar drinking and listening to Cherry perform. He joins Cherry and her "friends" for a drink, verbally sparring with her "date" Romeo. She and Rojack flirt and kiss; Rojack gets a call from Roberts who warns him to leave. He has an encounter with Tony, who orders Cherry to sing another set. She sings a hymn so Tony fires her. She leaves with Rojack, they get breakfast, and she invites him to a special place.
A Catenary of Manners
The special place is Cherry's post-mortem sister's old apartment. They have sex, and Rojack realizes he has fallen in love with her. He returns to his apartment in the afternoon and talks with Arthur who informs Rojack that Rojack's television show has been cancelled. He then speaks with Dr. Tharchman who tells Rojack that he must take leave from the college. When later talking to Bettina Gigot he picks up on a hint regarding Deborah concerning her father and daughter. Rojack then meets Roberts at the police station who presents him with three pieces of evidence that seem to implicate Rojack. Roberts presses him for a confession. Rojack refuses and is cleared of wrongdoing. Rojack goes back to Cherry and they make love.
A Vision in the Desert
Rojack and Cherry talk a bit about Rojack's TV show. Then, Cherry tells her life-story: her dead parents; her brother's incest; "Daddy Warbucks" who turns out to be Kelly; her escape from Vegas; her relationships; her two abortions, one with Kelly and one with a man named Shago; her finally having a vaginal orgasm with Rojack; and her premonition of death soon after. Shago appears at the chapter's end and tells Rojack to leave.
A Votive Is Prepared
Rojack and Shago fight. Rojack gets the upper hand and throws Shago down the stairs.
At the Lion and the Serpent
Rojack goes to the Waldorf Tower to confront Kelly. Rojack talks with Ruta and Deirdre before eating with Kelly. Rojack confesses to the murder of Deborah, then walks the parapet around the roof of the building, hitting Kelly with Shago's umbrella before escaping. He returns to Cherry's only to find out from Roberts she has been killed.
At the Harbors of the Moon Again (Epilogue)
Rojack travels to Las Vegas where he wins big at the tables, paying off all his debts. He imagines speaking with Cherry in Heaven before he heads south to Guatemala and the Yucatán.
Style
The style of An American Dream seemed to grow organically from Mailer's "Big Bite" columns for Esquire. His voice, explains Rollyson, is a "supple first-person" persona "punctuated with feisty asides and comic exaggerations".[10]An American Dream is narrated by Stephen Richards Rojack, the novel's protagonist, in "an edgy, rococo style" that shows Mailer at the height of his narrative powers.[7] Andrew Gordon points out that the events of the novel unfold at a quick pace, compared to Mailer's prior works, writing "before we are five pages into the novel, Rojack has killed four Germans in a grotesque and graphically violent scene. By the end of thirty pages, Rojack has murdered his wife".[11] Gordon finds that Mailer tempers the shock of An American Dream's violence by using a combination of flashback sequences, playful, heavily stylized language, and an abundance of mythical, fairy tale imagery to evoke an exaggerated, dreamlike psychological fantasy.[12]
While Kaufmann likens Mailer's narrative to a medieval allegory in its emphasis on magic and metaphysics, Rollyson suggests it embodies an Elizabethan baroqueness and shows Mailer at his best as a novelist.[13][10] Kaufmann avers that Mailer borrowed his guiding principle from Marx: "quantity changes quality".[13] Mailer blends modern America with Rojack's dream visions, making his narrative akin to the magician's stage show in writing a "novelist as magician who writes a book filled with effects without any causes".[14] Even though Mailer himself said he had the intention of writing a realistic novel, his style suggests otherwise. An American Dream is like something out of Chaucer or Dante, or out of American romance, or that the events created by Rojack do not represent literal occurrences that readers come to expect in a novel.[15] Still, argues Merrill, one cannot dismiss Mailer's serious intentions.[15]
Barry H. Leeds, in his Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer, suggests two primary structural patterns: one is Rojack's pilgrimage from "damnation and madness to salvation and sanity" and the other is the geometrical sexual connections shared by the characters.[16]
Analysis
Dearborn calls Rojack the "quintessential Mailer hero" as he exemplifies many of the traits and accomplishments Mailer himself as a war hero, a successful politician, a television personality, and a professor of "existential psychology".[17] Mailer commented in a later New York Post interview: "I wanted a man who was very much of my generation and generally of my type".[18] Rojack feels that his reality is created by the public and that he has become just a shell, a mere actor, which creates a crisis of identity and precipitates his actions.[19] Like Mailer's Hipster, Rojack does not live until he has experienced death — so his murder of Deborah frees him from his hollow public life and initiates his transformation.[20] It's only through the lowest and most severe forms of physical transgression that Rojack, like Mailer's Hipster is able to begin his journey toward psychic redemption.[21] Rojack's journey reflects a seminal theme for Mailer in the importance of growth by confronting serious existential situations with courage.[22] In a 1963 letter, Mailer defines what he means by "existentialism" as "that character can dissolve in one stricken event and re-form in startling new fashion".[23]
Likewise, states Dearborn, Rojack believes that in killing Deborah, he has cured himself of cancer,[24] a theme that becomes explicit in the novel's epilogue where "Cancer is the growth of madness denied".[25] In a later interview with High Times, Mailer elaborates further noting "A lot of people get cancer because they were too responsible with their lives. They led lives that were more responsible then they wanted to be. They lived their lives for others more than for themselves. Denied themselves certain fundamental things, whatever they were. . . . Cancer is a revolution of the cells".[26] Leeds adds that, for Mailer, cancer represents moral failure and is a significant theme in much of Mailer's work.[27]
It is not easy to accept or to excuse Rojack's ability to escape punishment for his transgression of murder. Often characters cannot so easily get away with murder unless it stems from revenge.[28] Murderer's gambit, whose success requires the approval of the reader, can be applied as a way for the "novelist to gamble with the reader's empathy in the hopes of either winning greater sympathy or . . . greater interest in the character's situation".[29] Yet, there must contain more strategical tactics in order to win over the jury. For example, when Rojack murders his wife, he compares it to the killing of the Germans. The juxtaposition poses the question of what is the difference between killing a person in wartime and killing a person in society?[30] Mailer also hints that the narrative is "framed" by a dream cloud through the use of the novel's name An American Dream and the allusion of F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz".[31]
An American Dream was controversial for its portrayal and treatment of women, and was critiqued by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics.[32][33] Millett sees Rojack as another incarnation of a Mailer protagonist who becomes heroic through the linking of sex and violence.[34] Mailer, she argues, attempts to use existentialism to excuse Rojack's misogynistic exploration as his "sexistentialist project".[35] Rojack's victims are women and a black man, appropriate objects of the white male's "dominant wrath".[36] Millett chastises Rojack, and by proxy Mailer, for what she assesses as the feigned pretense of radically progressive beliefs that belie his defiant sense of white male privilege, likening him to an old southern Confederate, pretending nobility while lashing out at the encroachment of true progress. Millett notes that "Rojack belongs to the oldest ruling class in the world, and like one of Faulkner's ancient retainers of a lost cause, he is making his stand on the preservation of a social hierarchy that sees itself as threatened with extinction. His partial Jewish ancestry and his 'liberal' views to the contrary, Rojack is the last surviving white man as conquering hero".[37]
Millett criticizes Mailer for being almost wholly unique among prominent authors in championing a character who is a murderer, while allowing the offender to escape any accountability for his crimes:
The humanist convictions which underlie Crime and Punishment (the original and still the greatest study in what it is like to commit murder), may all go by the board. Both Dostoyevsky and Dreiser, in An American Tragedy gradually created in their murderers an acceptance of responsibility for the violation of life which their actions constituted, and both transcend their crimes through atonement. Rojack has some singularity in being one of the first literary characters to get away with murder; he is surely the first hero as homicide to rejoice in his crime and never really lose his creator's support.[38]
Likewise, Judith Fetterley criticizes Mailer's treatment of women by his male characters in pointing out that each female character must meet a violent death in order for Mailer's hero to be "free".[39] Although power might lay in the masculine hands of those in government and big business, women have a mystical power over men.[40] This power enacts a control over Rojack and only when Rojack rids himself of Deborah does he feel in possession of himself.[41]
American culture, Justin Shaw states, has a tradition in which society expects men to achieve the "self-made mode of masculinity".[42]Betty Friedan writes in The Feminine Mystique that men, in other words, were not enemies but "fellow victims" of society's expected and assigned gender roles.[43] His wife's recognition of Rojack in the existing world is shown to have been the link to his masculinity which left him "a void where his sense of masculinity resided" when she tells him that she no longer loves him.[44] Rojack then begins his search for an active subject role in a masculine role.
Maggie McKinley argues that Mailer uses "violence as a literary device that facilitates an analysis of his philosophies surrounding existential freedoms, social oppression, and gendered relationships".[45] Rojack's violence is not just a result of his masculinity, but from chasing the "sexual freedom that is often denied by a repressive or 'cancerous' society".[46] Violence provides a centre for Rojack's "construction of a liberated masculinity":[47] "Rojack seems able to discuss manhood only through the language of violence", specifically addressing his view that masculinity revolves around either the repression or embrace of violence.[48]
Robert Merrill posits that An American Dream seems to suggest violence "is not an intolerable aberration but an extreme example of life's essential irrationality".[49]
Publication
An American Dream was first published as an eight-part serial in Esquire, January–August 1964.[50] Mailer announced the serial in his final "Big Bite" column, making clear that his serial will distinguish itself from other authors. Mailer writes: "It's been a long time since anything of this sort has been tried by an author who takes himself seriously"; Mailer cited Dickens and Dostoyevsky as inspiration.[51] While the serialization proved a challenge for Mailer he writes that the process "has me more or less pissing blood."[52]Esquire's circulation increased to 900,000 during the serial's first month.[53]
Mailer rewrote 40% of the scenes for the novel's release in book form.[54] Dial Press published the book in hardcover, and Dell published the paperback. The novel was edited for book publication by E.L. Doctorow.[17]
Writing one of the first and most positive reviews in Life, John Aldridge stated that An American Dream "transcends the conventional limits of blasphemy to expose the struggle toward psychic redemption which is the daily warfare of our hidden outlaw selves".[60] In Vogue, Joan Didion called An American Dream "the only serious New York novel since The Great Gatsby".[61] Conrad Knickerbocker writes in The New York Times that Mailer "is one of the few really interesting writers anywhere",[62] and that An American Dream "defines the American style by presenting the most extreme of our realities — murder, love and spirit strangulated, the corruption of power and the powerful, the sacrifice of self to image, all of it mix mastered in booze and heat-and-serve sex, giving off the smell of burning rubber to the sound of sirens".[63] Since 1965, An American Dream has been defended by Mailer's critics, some of which call it one of his better novels.[49]Tony Tanner posits that a few critics likely found An American Dream to be "outrageous" due to their perception of it as a simple narrative and not as a surrealist work. Tanner hailed Leo Bersani's review of An American Dream as a "brilliant comment on the novel as a whole" because Bersani recognized the purposeful "exuberance" that Mailer used.[64]
Stanley Edgar Hyman describes An American Dream as a dreadful novel and says it's the worst that he has read in years.[65] He calls the novel pretentious and focuses his critique on what he sees as the flaws in the plot, images, and the tropes.[66]
Nachem Malech Mailer, known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, and filmmaker. In a career spanning more than six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II.
The Naked and the Dead is a novel written by Norman Mailer. Published by Rinehart & Company in 1948, when he was 25, it was his debut novel. It depicts the experiences of a platoon during World War II, based partially on Mailer's experiences as a cook with the 112th Cavalry Regiment during the Philippines Campaign in World War II. The book quickly became a bestseller, paving the way for other Mailer's works such as The Deer Park, Advertisements for Myself, and The Time of Our Time. He believed The Naked and the Dead to be his most renowned work. It was the first popular novel about the war and is considered one of the greatest English-language novels. It was adapted into a film in 1958.
The Executioner's Song (1979) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning true crime novel by Norman Mailer that depicts the events related to the execution of Gary Gilmore for murder by the state of Utah. The title of the book may be a play on "The Lord High Executioner's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. "The Executioner's Song" is also the title of a poem by Mailer, published in Fuck You magazine in September 1964 and reprinted in Cannibals and Christians (1966), and the title of one of the chapters of his 1975 non-fiction book The Fight.
The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History is a nonfiction novel recounting the October 1967 March on the Pentagon written by Norman Mailer and published by New American Library in 1968. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award in category Arts and Letters. Mailer's unique rendition of the nonfiction novel was perhaps his most successful example of new journalism, and received the most critical attention. The book originated as an essay published in Harper's Magazine titled "The Steps of the Pentagon," at the time the longest magazine article ever published, surpassing John Hersey's "Hiroshima" in The New Yorker.
Sexual Politics is the debut book by American writer and activist Kate Millett, based on her PhD dissertation at Columbia University. It was published in 1970 by Doubleday. It is regarded as a classic of feminism and one of radical feminism's key texts, a formative piece in shaping the intentions of the second-wave feminist movement. In Sexual Politics, an explicit focus is placed on male dominance throughout prominent 20th century art and literature. According to Millett, western literature reflects patriarchal constructions and the heteronormativity of society. She argues that men have established power over women, but that this power is the result of social constructs rather than innate or biological qualities.
The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster is a 9,000-word essay by Norman Mailer that connects the "psychic havoc" wrought by the Holocaust and atomic bomb to the aftermath of slavery in America in the figuration of the Hipster, or the "white negro". The essay is a call to abandon Eisenhower liberalism and a numbing culture of conformity and psychoanalysis in favor of the rebelliousness, personal violence and emancipating sexuality that Mailer associates with marginalized black culture. The White Negro was first published in the 1957 special issue of Dissent, before being published separately by City Lights. Mailer's essay was controversial upon its release and received a mixed reception, winning praise, for example, from Eldridge Cleaver and criticism from James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Allen Ginsberg. Baldwin, in particular, heavily criticized the work, asserting that it perpetuated the notorious "myth of the sexuality of Negros" and stating that it was beneath Mailer's talents. The work remains his most famous and most reprinted essay and it established Mailer's reputation as a "philosopher of hip".
Lady Jeanne Louise Campbell was a British socialite and foreign correspondent who wrote for the Evening Standard in the 1950s and 1960s.
Why Are We In Vietnam? (WWVN) is a 1967 novel by the American author Norman Mailer. It focuses on a hunting trip to the Brooks Range in Alaska where a young man is brought by his father, a wealthy businessman who works for a company that makes cigarette filters and is obsessed with killing a grizzly bear. As the novel progresses, the protagonist is increasingly disillusioned that his father resorts to hunting tactics that seem dishonest and weak, including the use of a helicopter and taking credit for killing a bear. At the end of the novel, the protagonist tells the reader that he is soon going to serve in the Vietnam War as a soldier.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 is a non-fiction novel written by Norman Mailer which covers the Republican and Democratic national party political conventions of 1968 and the anti-Vietnam War protests surrounding them. It was published in 1968 by the World Publishing Company.
An American Dream is a 1966 American Technicolor drama film directed by Robert Gist and starring Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh. It was adapted from the 1965 Norman Mailer novel of the same name. The film received an Oscar nomination for Best Song for "A Time for Love," music by Johnny Mandel and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster.
"The Time of Her Time" is a 1959 short story written by Norman Mailer, first appearing in his miscellany Advertisements for Myself. The story depicts macho Irish Catholic bullfighting instructor Sergius O'Shaugnessy and his sexual conquest of a young, middle-class Jewish college girl, Denise Gondelman. The short story was adapted to film in 2000 by Francis Delia. On multiple occasions, Mailer has touted "The Time of Her Time" as "the godfather of Lolita."
Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984) is a noir thriller and murder mystery novel by American writer Norman Mailer reminiscent of the works of Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, and Raymond Chandler. The novel was written in only two months in order to fulfill a contractual obligation. The book was adapted into a film, directed by Mailer, in 1987.
"Superman Comes to the Supermarket" is an essay by the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer about the 1960 Democratic convention. Originally published in Esquire as "Superman Comes to the Supermart," this essay was Mailer's initial foray into political journalism. It characterizes John F. Kennedy as a potential "existential hero" who could revitalize the US after eight years under Dwight D. Eisenhower to rediscover its lost imagination. "Superman" further develops and emphasizes Mailer's concern with the importance of the individual's will and creativity that must challenge conformity and obedience in American life to fully realize a genuine life. With "Superman", Mailer extends New Journalism by taking an active role in the narrative, which would characterize much of his subsequent journalistic style and lead to his Pulitzer Prize for The Armies of the Night in 1968.
During a November 1960 party celebrating his mayoral candidacy, American public intellectual Norman Mailer twice stabbed his wife Adele Morales with a pen-knife in a drunken altercation, nearly taking her life. The incident, though by many accounts swept under the rug by Mailer and his associates, had a lasting impact on his public and critical legacy and persona.
The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer is a 1967 anthology of short stories by Norman Mailer. It is grouped into eight thematic sections and contains nineteen stories, many appearing in one of Mailer's miscellanies; thirteen were published in periodicals or other anthologies before appearing in this collection. The collection was reprinted in hardcover in 1980 and some of the stories were reprinted in other volumes.
"The Man Who Studied Yoga", a novella by Norman Mailer written in 1952, was first published in the 1956 collection New Short Novels 2 then later in Mailer's 1959 miscellany Advertisements for Myself (AFM). It is a tale of a "writer manqué", or a writer who fails to write, reflecting some of Mailer's own anxiety in the 1950s as he tries to reinvent himself.
Beyond the Law is a 1968 independent film written by and starring Norman Mailer.
This Norman Mailer bibliography lists major books by and about Mailer, an American novelist, new journalist, essayist, public intellectual, filmmaker, and biographer. Over a fifty-nine-year period, Mailer won two Pulitzer Prizes and had eleven books spend a total of 160 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Mailer's output included fiction, non-fiction, poems and essays. Biographer J. Michael Lennon called Mailer the chronicler of the American Century, and a talent whose career has "been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, improvisational, public, productive, lengthy and misunderstood".
"In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964" is an essay written by Norman Mailer for Esquire about the Republican National Convention in 1964. Like Mailer's other journalism in the 1960s, "Red Light" uses the subjective techniques of new journalism and assumes a third-person persona to participate in, report on, and comment on the events in California in the summer of 1964. The essay is divided into three sections: the events leading up to the convention, including Goldwater's rise, the events leading up to Goldwater's nomination, and Mailer's view of his acceptance.
The Magician's Wife is a novel by James M. Cain published in 1965 by Dial Press.
Didion, Joan (April 20, 1965). "A Social Eye". National Review. pp.329–330.
Epstein, Joseph (April 17, 1965). "Norman X: The Literary Man's Cassius Clay". New Republic. pp.22, 24–25.
Fetterley, Judith (1986). "An American Dream: 'Hula, Hula,' Said the Witches". In Lennon, J. Michael (ed.). Critical Essays on Norman Mailer. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. pp.136–144. ISBN0816186952.
Glickman, Susan (1982–1983). "The World as Will and Idea: A Comparative Study of An American Dream and Mr. Sammler's Planet". Modern Fiction Studies. 28: 569–582. ISSN1080-658X.
Knickerbocker, Conrad (March 14, 1965). "A Man Desperate for a New Life"(PDF). The New York Times. Book Reviews. pp.1, 36, 38–39. Retrieved August 31, 2018.
—; Lennon, Donna Pedro (2015). Lucas, Gerald R. (ed.). "65.7 [An American Dream]". Norman Mailer: Works & Days. Project Mailer. Retrieved August 31, 2018. See also 64.2-64.9.
— (March 25, 1968). "Norman Mailer on An American Dream". The New York Post (Interview). p.38.
— (September 1979). "Norman Mailer: The Champ of American Letters". High Times (Interview). Interviewed by Legs McNeil.
McKinley, Maggie (Fall 2012). "Mailer's Modern Myth: Reexamining Violence and Masculinity in An American Dream". The Mailer Review. 6 (1): 158–169.
— (2015). "'Up to the Nostrils in Anguish': Mailer and Bellow on Masculine Anxiety and Violent Catharsis". The Mailer Review. 9 (1): 99–117. ISSN1936-4679.
Shaw, Justin (2014). "Destabilizing Sexistentialism and Hegemonic Masculinity in Norman Mailer's An American Dream". Canadian Review of American Studies. 44 (1): 44–64. doi:10.3138/cras.2013.030.
Whalen-Bridge, John (2002). "Murderous Desire in Lolita: With Related Thoughts on Mailer's An American Dream". Nabokov Studies. 7: 75–88. doi:10.1353/nab.2010.0007.
Wolfe, Tom (March 14, 1965). "Son of Crime and Punishment, or: How to Go Eight Fast Rounds with the Heavyweight Champ and Lose". Washington Post. Book Week. pp.1, 10, 12–13.
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