Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

Talk:An American Dream Expanded/to do

2019-04-21T20:30:26Z

Waebo:

* All pages should use {{tl|aade-sm}} somewhere on the page. This gives the appropriate categories and a banner about the page’s part on the project
* Add bibliography entries (Appendix II.doc in Letters directory).
* Incorporate items in the Misc directory from the shared drive.
** Add to Gallery. (Everyone could do '''one''' of these, at least.)added 1 to gallery and 1 to snippets--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
::''(friends, I'm listing those files in Misc., please sign and strike off when you have uploaded them to PM for ease of recon)''~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 19:38, 16 April 2019 (UTC))
:#<s>196505 PW Best Sellers</s> --[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:38, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19640302</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:56, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650125 Royalty Statement</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:33, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650310 Book Week News</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650315 Invitation</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650316 Advertising Copy</S>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 14:42, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650322 Publishers Weekly Currents</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 14:48, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650322 Publishers Weekly</s> I will do this one [[User:Sherita Sims-Jones|Sherita Sims-Jones]] ([[User talk:Sherita Sims-Jones|talk]]) 11:05, 21 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650401 Herald Tribune</s>~~ [[User:Waebo|waebo]][[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 15:10, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650403 New Republic</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 15:16, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:# 19650418 Best Sellers
:#<s>19650514 Envelope</s>~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 13:45, 17 April 2019 (EDT))''Friends, I do not have access to a pdf to jpg/png convertor, so I uploaded this but only in pdf and it doesn't seem usable in that form. If you have access or a work around please advice or take and make happen''[[File:Cry.png|20px]]''Thanks!'' ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 14:54, 17 April 2019 (EDT))
::[[reply to|Dmcgonagill]] I have a pdf to jpeg file converter. [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 10:13, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
::{{reply to|Waebo}} Awesome! You want to convert my envelope one for me then? Or is it something you can share?~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 11:11, 18 April 2019 (EDT))
:::{{reply to|Waebo|Dmcgonagill}} I may have to borrow your services too, Rian. I've got several files I'm trying to convert. What program are you using that converts?? [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk|JVbird|talk]]) (UTC) 22:02, 19 April 2019
:#<s> 19650923 Mary Bancroft Letter- I will add </s> [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] --[[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 11:36, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>20190302_L The New York -I will add</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)Dillbug
:#<s>20190302_002</s> [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:#<s>20190302 Harper's plan</s> [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:#<s>20190302_there's SOI park</s> [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:<s># Cover Mock-up --I will do this one, JVbird</s> [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:<s># Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird</s>[[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:<s># Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird</s>[[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:#<s>Snippet - I will do</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)
:# Trotter Letter - I will do this one. [[User:Mango Masala|Mango Masala]] ([[User talk:Mango Masala|talk]]) 13:01, 19 April 2019 (EDT)
* Secure permissions for essays.
* Post full-text essays.
* Secure permissions for reviews.
* Post full-text reviews. Working on Didion ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 23:21, 15 April 2019 (UTC))<s>Working on Buckley</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC) Working on Dana, North American Review JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) {{reply to|Grlucas}} Should these full reviews be transcribed or posted as PDF and do we need to secure permission? Thanks, [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) (UTC)
:<s># Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird</s> [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:<s># Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird</s>[[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])

:# <s>Nichols-NYT</s> -I will work on this one waebo[[User:waebo|waebo]] ([[User talk: waebo| talk]])
* Add notes and other research, like identifying important people, events, publications, etc.
** Links to Wikipedia when appropriate.
* Post credits. (I'll do this near the project’s completion. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:21, 5 April 2019 (UTC))

An American Dream Expanded

2019-04-21T20:23:13Z

Waebo: /* Reviews */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:''An American Dream'' Expanded}}
{{Aad-tabs}}

{{notice|This project is coming in the spring of 2019. If you’d like to contribute, see the [[Talk:An American Dream Expanded|discussion page]]. }}

[[File:65-7c.jpg|thumb|Dust wrapper of the British edition published by Andre Deutsch on 26 April, 1965.]]
{{cquote|''An American Dream'' is Norman Mailer’s first novel in nine years. He wrote it at a high pitch, each chapter appearing in ''Esquire'' while he was still at work on the next: a method now unusual but common enough among the great novelists of the nineteenth century, which contributed much to the quivering tension of the story.

The theme of challenge suggested by Mailer’s choice of this method is very much a part of the book. His hero challenges the Devil himself. Stephen Rojack kills his wife, lies to the police, is interrogated by them, discovers a woman, his wife’s opposite, in whom he senses the truth and strength he longs for. The ingredients of his story are deliberately those familiar from many a thriller or movie-murder—suspense, sex—but Rojack lives these experiences with a fierce intensity which shatters their popular image and reveals extraordinary meanings behind them. He is a man who believes in God and the Devil, and to whom God is courage, not love. His actions become explosively significant because he feels that any one of them might open the crack through which the Devil’s power, or that of God, could flood in.

Simply on the level of ‘what will happen next?’ ''An American Dream'' grips relentlessly: will the suspicious police pounce on Rojack? Will he and Cherry, his new girl, be able to
establish the love which has begun to grow between them? But beyond this there is the immense exhilaration springing from the boldness and passion with which Norman Mailer tackles his central theme of man as the battleground for God and the Devil.

This is his most exciting book since ''The Naked and the Dead'', which became a modern classic and has sold, over two and a half million copies in the English language.|source=Dust jacket text, British edition, Andre Deutsch, April 1965.}}

==Gallery==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:AAD-Esquire.jpg|Title and opening paragraph of the first installment of ''An American Dream'' in ''Esquire'', January 1964.
|File:AAD-Proofs.jpg|Cover of uncorrected page proof of the Dial Press edition.
|File:65-7.jpg|Front and spine of dust wrapper of the Dial Press edition.
|File:1964 NM by Ann Barry.jpg|Back panel of dust wrapper of the Dial press edition: photograph of Mailer by Anne Barry.
|File:Aad-ad.jpg|Advertisement in the ''New York Times'' for the ''Esquire'' serial version, 22 April 1964.
|File:AAD-Cover-Mockup.jpg|An early ''AAD'' cover mockup.
|File:Saturday Review.jpg|Cover of 20 March 1965 ''Saturday Review'' depicting Mailer.
|File:AAD-Bestsellers.jpg|Best seller list in ''Book Week'', 30 May 1965, showing the novel in No. 10 position.
|File:19650315-Invitation.png|Invitation to the reception for the novel at the Village Vanguard in New York on publication day, 15 March 1965.
|File:19660829-Invitation-Screening.png|An invitation to the screening of the film ''An American Dream''.
|File:AAD-Movie-Ad.jpg|Advertisement for the film version of the novel from Warner Brothers Pressbook.
|File:1964-Bookseller.jpg|Cover of the British trade journal, ''The Bookseller'', 26 December 1964, featuring the forthcoming British edition of ''An American Dream'', published by Andre Deutsch.
|File:1964-PW.jpg|Cover of ''Publishers’ Weekly'' featuring the forthcoming Dial Press version of ''An American Dream'', 12 October 1964.
|File:65-7a.jpg|Cover of the third Dell paperback edition, published February 1970.
|File:65-7b.jpg|Paperback.
|File:65-7d.jpg|Paperback.
|File:65-7-Chinese Cover.jpg|Chinese hardcover.
|File:65-7-Vintage Cover.png|Vintage cover.
|File:65-7-Harper Ed.jpg|Harper cover.
|File:NYT AAD Ad-2.jpg|“[[An American Dream Expanded/Major Reviews for a Major Novel|Major Reviews for a Major Novel]]” in the ''NYT''.
|File:PW_May_1965.JPG|Best seller list of the week in ''Publishers Weekly'', May 1965, showing ''[[An American Dream]]'' in No. 6 position.
|File:19640302_Rights_and_Permissions.JPG|Announcement of Warner Brothers studios purchasing the movie rights to ''[[An American Dream]]'', March 2, 1964
|File:19650316 1.JPG|Advertising Copy page 1 of 3
|File:19650316 2.JPG|Advertising Copy page 2 of 3
|File:19650316 3.JPG|Advertising Copy page 3 of 3
|File:19650322.1.jpg|Press Conference ''Publishers Weekly'' March 23, 1965 page 1 of 4
|File:19650322.2.jpg|Press Conference ''Publishers Weekly'' March 23, 1965 page 2 of 4
|File:19650322.3.JPG|Press Conference ''Publishers Weekly'' March 23, 1965 page 3 of 4
|File:19650322.4.JPG|Press Conference ''Publishers Weekly'' March 23, 1965 page 4 of 4
|File:19650322 Publishers Weekly 1.JPG|''Publishers Weekly'' March 22, 1965 page 1 of 6
|File:19650322 Publishers Weekly 2.JPG|''Publishers Weekly'' March 22, 1965 page 2 of 6
|File:19650322 Publishers Weekly 3.JPG|''Publishers Weekly'' March 22, 1965 page 3 of 6
|File:19650322 Publishers Weekly 4.JPG|''Publishers Weekly'' March 22, 1965 page 4 of 6
|File:19650322 Publishers Weekly 5.JPG|''Publishers Weekly'' March 22, 1965 page 5 of 6
|File:19650322 Publishers Weekly 6.JPG|''Publishers Weekly'' March 22, 1965 page 6 of 6
|File:19650401 Herald Tribune.JPG |Mailer hosts party for Jose Torres, ''Herald Tribune'' April 1, 1965 page 1 of 2
|File:19650401.1 Herald Tribune.JPG |Mailer hosts party for Jose Torres, ''Herald Tribune'' April 1, 1965 page 2 of 2
|File:1650403.JPG|''The New Republic'' April 3, 1965
|File:20190302 SOI parts 1.JPG|Scene: Inside an Army Tent in Vietnam March 22, 1965 page 1 of 3
|File:20190302 SOI parts 2.JPG|Scene: Inside an Army Tent in Vietnam March 22, 1965 page 2 of 3
|File:20190302 SOI parts 3.JPG|Scene: Inside an Army Tent in Vietnam March 22, 1965 page 3 of 3
|File:Huffman - Jungian Approach (1).jpg|An outline for James Huffman's presentation on ''An American Dream'' at the American Culture Association's Popular Culture Conference, April 25-28, 1979.
|File:Cover Mock-up-1.jpg|Mock-up cover for ''An American Dream''.
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

==Blurbs and Snippets==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:1963-AAD-Snippet.jpg|“I’ll finish my book in another year of bleeding at the typewriter,” Norman Mailer sighed at the Spindletop the other night. (1963)
|File:1963-NYW.jpg|'''Norman Mailer''' has just come into a large chunk of money. Dial, the book publishers, have given him a reported $125,000 for the rights to his as yet untitled and unwritten novel. . . . (1963)
|File:20190302 HarperPlan.JPG|''Harper’s'' plan an anthology of Norman Mailer criticism.
|File:20190302 002 .JPG|John Braine states that “the only first-rate novelist is Norman Mailer” publishing in 1965.
|File:19650130.jpg|Tom Wolfe’s review of ''AAD'' is mentioned in ''Book Week'' on March 14, 1965.
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

==Letters==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:19650417 Letter.jpg|Granville Hicks, in his review of Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' [''SR'', March 20], tells us that Mailer’s main character has no reality, the other characters are “dummies,” the writing is sloppy, and the plot is absurd. One might say the same about Dostoevsky’s ''Notes from the Underground''. Perhaps ''An American Dream'' is not a great book, but it is most certainly not a “bad joke.” It contains scenes of great power and pages of brilliant imagery. It holds one’s interest. It is an entertaining book to read. ~W. K. MASON, Madison, Wis.
|File:Trotter Letter 1965.jpg|A letter from Mr. William Trotter to Mr. Wallace expressing his support for Norman Mailer.
|File:19650923-Mary.Bancroft.Letter.JPG|Mary Bancroft offers her strong support for Mailer in this 1965 letter.
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

== Reviews ==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:Buckley_Miami_Herald.JPG|[[There's Hope in Mailer|William F. Buckley, Jr. states]]: “it was {{NM}} who developed the cult of the Hipster—the truly modern American who lets the bleary world go by doing whatever it bloody well likes, because nothing it does can upset the Hipsters’ inexhaustible Cool.” (''The Miami Herald'', September 26, 1965)
|File:Dana_-_North_Am_Review_copy_(1).jpg|Robert Dana's review of ''An American Dream'', published July 1965 in ''The North American Review'', declares the novel to be Mailer's "best and most powerful novel since ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'', despite what Dana sees as a poor conclusion and a lack of meaning in the main character's actions.
[[File:Lewis Nichols In and Out of books.jpg|thumb|Lewis Nichols In and Out of Books]]
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

[[Category:Projects]]

File:Lewis Nichols In and Out of books.jpg

2019-04-21T20:22:40Z

Waebo:

This is an article by Lewis Nichols that is divided into section round-up, salvage, collaboration, series, and publisher's row

User:Waebo

2019-04-19T14:04:20Z

Waebo:

'''<big>Brief Bio</big>'''

==Hello Everyone,==

<br>
My name is Rian. I am a graduate at MGA with a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology. I had live in Warner Robins for about 25 years. I am always thriving to continue in learning because in life you are always learning. I plan on using my experience throughout my career.

==Career Experience==

<br>
I work for MGA as Information Support Specialist. I handle all audio and video events for the Warner Robins campus. I am in charge of maintenance for computers, projectors, and software. I plan on adventuring out to other fields in Information Technology to learn a vast variety of skills.

==Personal Life ==

<br>
I am an avid bowler for a league. I have yet to bowl a perfect game, which is a 300 game, but the closest I have come is a 279. I do enjoy riding my bicycle to work because it gives me a little freedom before I arrive at work. I live about 30 minutes away from work, which is a nice bike ride if the weather is right. On the weekends I am a typical gamer/ nerd because some of my friends like to get together and hang out and play video games. I believe video games are cheap entertainment.

</br> Review article
[[User:Waebo/Review article]]

[[Category:Student Editors]]

Talk:An American Dream Expanded/to do

2019-04-18T19:19:56Z

Waebo:

* All pages should use {{tl|aade-sm}} somewhere on the page. This gives the appropriate categories and a banner about the page’s part on the project
* Add bibliography entries (Appendix II.doc in Letters directory).
* Incorporate items in the Misc directory from the shared drive.
** Add to Gallery. (Everyone could do '''one''' of these, at least.)added 1 to gallery and 1 to snippets--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
::''(friends, I'm listing those files in Misc., please sign and strike off when you have uploaded them to PM for ease of recon)''~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 19:38, 16 April 2019 (UTC))
:#<s>196505 PW Best Sellers</s> --[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:38, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19640302</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:56, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650125 Royalty Statement</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:33, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650310 Book Week News</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650315 Invitation</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650316 Advertising Copy</S>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 14:42, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650322 Publishers Weekly Currents</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 14:48, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:# 19650322 Publishers Weekly
:#<s> 19650401 Herald Tribune</s>~~ [[User:Waebo|waebo]][[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 15:10, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650403 New Republic</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 15:16, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:# 19650418 Best Sellers
:#<s>19650514 Envelope</s>~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 13:45, 17 April 2019 (EDT))''Friends, I do not have access to a pdf to jpg/png convertor, so I uploaded this but only in pdf and it doesn't seem usable in that form. If you have access or a work around please advice or take and make happen''[[File:Cry.png|20px]]''Thanks!'' ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 14:54, 17 April 2019 (EDT))
::[[reply to|Dmcgonagill]] I have a pdf to jpeg file converter. [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 10:13, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
::{{reply to|Waebo}} Awesome! You want to convert my envelope one for me then? Or is it something you can share?~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 11:11, 18 April 2019 (EDT))
:#<s> 19650923 Mary Bancroft Letter- I will add </s> [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] --[[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 11:36, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>20190302_L The New York -I will add</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)Dillbug
:# 20190302_002 [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# 20190302 Harper's plan [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# 20190302_there's SOI park [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# Cover Mock-up --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:#<s>Snippet - I will do</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)
:# Trotter Letter
* Secure permissions for essays.
* Post full-text essays.
* Secure permissions for reviews.
* Post full-text reviews. Working on Didion ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 23:21, 15 April 2019 (UTC))<s>Working on Buckley</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC) Working on Dana, North American Review JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) {{reply to|Grlucas}} Should these full reviews be transcribed or posted as PDF and do we need to secure permission? Thanks, [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) (UTC)
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Nichols-NYT -I will work on this one waebo[[User:waebo|waebo]] ([[User talk: waebo| talk]])
* Add notes and other research, like identifying important people, events, publications, etc.
** Links to Wikipedia when appropriate.
* Post credits. (I'll do this near the project’s completion. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:21, 5 April 2019 (UTC))

Talk:An American Dream Expanded/to do

2019-04-18T19:18:50Z

Waebo:

* All pages should use {{tl|aade-sm}} somewhere on the page. This gives the appropriate categories and a banner about the page’s part on the project
* Add bibliography entries (Appendix II.doc in Letters directory).
* Incorporate items in the Misc directory from the shared drive.
** Add to Gallery. (Everyone could do '''one''' of these, at least.)added 1 to gallery and 1 to snippets--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
::''(friends, I'm listing those files in Misc., please sign and strike off when you have uploaded them to PM for ease of recon)''~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 19:38, 16 April 2019 (UTC))
:#<s>196505 PW Best Sellers</s> --[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:38, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19640302</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:56, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650125 Royalty Statement</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:33, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650310 Book Week News</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650315 Invitation</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650316 Advertising Copy</S>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 14:42, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650322 Publishers Weekly Currents</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 14:48, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:# 19650322 Publishers Weekly
:#<s> 19650401 Herald Tribune</s>~~ [[User:Waebo|waebo]][[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 15:10, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650403 New Republic</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 15:16, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:# 19650418 Best Sellers
:#<s>19650514 Envelope</s>~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 13:45, 17 April 2019 (EDT))''Friends, I do not have access to a pdf to jpg/png convertor, so I uploaded this but only in pdf and it doesn't seem usable in that form. If you have access or a work around please advice or take and make happen''[[File:Cry.png|20px]]''Thanks!'' ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 14:54, 17 April 2019 (EDT))
::[[reply to|Dmcgonagill]] I have a pdf to jpeg file converter. [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 10:13, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
::{{reply to|Waebo}} Awesome! You want to convert my envelope one for me then? Or is it something you can share?~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 11:11, 18 April 2019 (EDT))
:#<s> 19650923 Mary Bancroft Letter- I will add </s> [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] --[[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 11:36, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>20190302_L The New York -I will add</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)Dillbug
:# 20190302_002 [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# 20190302 Harper's plan [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# 20190302_there's SOI park [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# Cover Mock-up --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:#<s>Snippet - I will do</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)
:# Trotter Letter
* Secure permissions for essays.
* Post full-text essays.
* Secure permissions for reviews.
* Post full-text reviews. Working on Didion ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 23:21, 15 April 2019 (UTC))<s>Working on Buckley</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC) Working on Dana, North American Review JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) {{reply to|Grlucas}} Should these full reviews be transcribed or posted as PDF and do we need to secure permission? Thanks, [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) (UTC)
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Nichols-NYT -I will work on this one waebo[[User:waebo|wAebo]] ([[User talk: waebo| talk]])
* Add notes and other research, like identifying important people, events, publications, etc.
** Links to Wikipedia when appropriate.
* Post credits. (I'll do this near the project’s completion. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:21, 5 April 2019 (UTC))

Talk:An American Dream Expanded/to do

2019-04-18T19:10:15Z

Waebo:

* All pages should use {{tl|aade-sm}} somewhere on the page. This gives the appropriate categories and a banner about the page’s part on the project
* Add bibliography entries (Appendix II.doc in Letters directory).
* Incorporate items in the Misc directory from the shared drive.
** Add to Gallery. (Everyone could do '''one''' of these, at least.)added 1 to gallery and 1 to snippets--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
::''(friends, I'm listing those files in Misc., please sign and strike off when you have uploaded them to PM for ease of recon)''~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 19:38, 16 April 2019 (UTC))
:#<s>196505 PW Best Sellers</s> --[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:38, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19640302</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:56, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650125 Royalty Statement</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:33, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650310 Book Week News</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650315 Invitation</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650316 Advertising Copy</S>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 14:42, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650322 Publishers Weekly Currents</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 14:48, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:# 19650322 Publishers Weekly
:#<s> 19650401 Herald Tribune</s>~~ [[User:Waebo|waebo]][[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 15:10, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:# 19650403 New Republic
:# 19650418 Best Sellers
:#<s>19650514 Envelope</s>~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 13:45, 17 April 2019 (EDT))''Friends, I do not have access to a pdf to jpg/png convertor, so I uploaded this but only in pdf and it doesn't seem usable in that form. If you have access or a work around please advice or take and make happen''[[File:Cry.png|20px]]''Thanks!'' ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 14:54, 17 April 2019 (EDT))
::[[reply to|Dmcgonagill]] I have a pdf to jpeg file converter. [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 10:13, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
::{{reply to|Waebo}} Awesome! You want to convert my envelope one for me then? Or is it something you can share?~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 11:11, 18 April 2019 (EDT))
:#<s> 19650923 Mary Bancroft Letter- I will add </s> [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] --[[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 11:36, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>20190302_L The New York -I will add</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)Dillbug
:# 20190302_002 [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# 20190302 Harper's plan [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# 20190302_there's SOI park [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# Cover Mock-up --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:#<s>Snippet - I will do</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)
:# Trotter Letter
* Secure permissions for essays.
* Post full-text essays.
* Secure permissions for reviews.
* Post full-text reviews. Working on Didion ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 23:21, 15 April 2019 (UTC))<s>Working on Buckley</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC) Working on Dana, North American Review JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) {{reply to|Grlucas}} Should these full reviews be transcribed or posted as PDF and do we need to secure permission? Thanks, [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) (UTC)
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
* Add notes and other research, like identifying important people, events, publications, etc.
** Links to Wikipedia when appropriate.
* Post credits. (I'll do this near the project’s completion. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:21, 5 April 2019 (UTC))

An American Dream Expanded

2019-04-18T19:08:05Z

Waebo:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:''An American Dream'' Expanded}}
{{Aad-tabs}}

{{notice|This project is coming in the spring of 2019. If you’d like to contribute, see the [[Talk:An American Dream Expanded|discussion page]]. }}

[[File:65-7c.jpg|thumb|Dust wrapper of the British edition published by Andre Deutsch on 26 April, 1965.]]
{{cquote|''An American Dream'' is Norman Mailer’s first novel in nine years. He wrote it at a high pitch, each chapter appearing in ''Esquire'' while he was still at work on the next: a method now unusual but common enough among the great novelists of the nineteenth century, which contributed much to the quivering tension of the story.

The theme of challenge suggested by Mailer’s choice of this method is very much a part of the book. His hero challenges the Devil himself. Stephen Rojack kills his wife, lies to the police, is interrogated by them, discovers a woman, his wife’s opposite, in whom he senses the truth and strength he longs for. The ingredients of his story are deliberately those familiar from many a thriller or movie-murder—suspense, sex—but Rojack lives these experiences with a fierce intensity which shatters their popular image and reveals extraordinary meanings behind them. He is a man who believes in God and the Devil, and to whom God is courage, not love. His actions become explosively significant because he feels that any one of them might open the crack through which the Devil’s power, or that of God, could flood in.

Simply on the level of ‘what will happen next?’ ''An American Dream'' grips relentlessly: will the suspicious police pounce on Rojack? Will he and Cherry, his new girl, be able to
establish the love which has begun to grow between them? But beyond this there is the immense exhilaration springing from the boldness and passion with which Norman Mailer tackles his central theme of man as the battleground for God and the Devil.

This is his most exciting book since ''The Naked and the Dead'', which became a modern classic and has sold, over two and a half million copies in the English language.|source=Dust jacket text, British edition, Andre Deutsch, April 1965.}}

==Gallery==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:AAD-Esquire.jpg|Title and opening paragraph of the first installment of ''An American Dream'' in ''Esquire'', January 1964.
|File:AAD-Proofs.jpg|Cover of uncorrected page proof of the Dial Press edition.
|File:65-7.jpg|Front and spine of dust wrapper of the Dial Press edition.
|File:1964 NM by Ann Barry.jpg|Back panel of dust wrapper of the Dial press edition: photograph of Mailer by Anne Barry.
|File:Aad-ad.jpg|Advertisement in the ''New York Times'' for the ''Esquire'' serial version, 22 April 1964.
|File:AAD-Cover-Mockup.jpg|An early ''AAD'' cover mockup.
|File:Saturday Review.jpg|Cover of 20 March 1965 ''Saturday Review'' depicting Mailer.
|File:AAD-Bestsellers.jpg|Best seller list in ''Book Week'', 30 May 1965, showing the novel in No. 10 position.
|File:19650315-Invitation.png|Invitation to the reception for the novel at the Village Vanguard in New York on publication day, 15 March 1965.
|File:19660829-Invitation-Screening.png|An invitation to the screening of the film ''An American Dream''.
|File:AAD-Movie-Ad.jpg|Advertisement for the film version of the novel from Warner Brothers Pressbook.
|File:1964-Bookseller.jpg|Cover of the British trade journal, ''The Bookseller'', 26 December 1964, featuring the forthcoming British edition of ''An American Dream'', published by Andre Deutsch.
|File:1964-PW.jpg|Cover of ''Publishers’ Weekly'' featuring the forthcoming Dial Press version of ''An American Dream'', 12 October 1964.
|File:65-7a.jpg|Cover of the third Dell paperback edition, published February 1970.
|File:65-7b.jpg|Paperback.
|File:65-7d.jpg|Paperback.
|File:65-7-Chinese Cover.jpg|Chinese hardcover.
|File:65-7-Vintage Cover.png|Vintage cover.
|File:65-7-Harper Ed.jpg|Harper cover.
|File:20190302_L_The_New_York_Time.JPG|Advertisement in the ''NYT''.
|File:PW_May_1965.JPG|Best seller list of the week in ''Publishers Weekly'', May 1965, showing ''[[An American Dream]]'' in No. 6 position.
|File:19640302_Rights_and_Permissions.JPG|Announcement of Warner Brothers studios purchasing the movie rights to ''[[An American Dream]]'', March 2, 1964
|File:19650130.jpg|Book Week News
|File:19650923-Mary.Bancroft.Letter.JPG|Mary Bancroft Letter.
|File:19650316 1.JPG|Advertising Copy page 1 of 3
|File:19650316 2.JPG|Advertising Copy page 2 of 3
|File:19650316 3.JPG|Advertising Copy page 3 of 3
|File:19650322.1.jpg|Press Conference ''Publishers Weekly'' March 23, 1965 page 1 of 4
|File:19650322.2.jpg|Press Conference ''Publishers Weekly'' March 23, 1965 page 2 of 4
|File:19650322.3.JPG|Press Conference ''Publishers Weekly'' March 23, 1965 page 3 of 4
|File:19650322.4.JPG|Press Conference ''Publishers Weekly'' March 23, 1965 page 4 of 4
|File:19650401 Herald Tribune.JPG | Herald Tribune page 1 of 2
|File:19650401.1 Herald Tribune.JPG | Herald Tribune page 2 of 2
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

==Blurbs and Snippets==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:1963-AAD-Snippet.jpg|“I’ll finish my book in another year of bleeding at the typewriter,” Norman Mailer sighed at the Spindletop the other night. (1963)
|File:1963-NYW.jpg|'''Norman Mailer''' has just come into a large chunk of money. Dial, the book publishers, have given him a reported $125,000 for the rights to his as yet untitled and unwritten novel. . . . (1963)
|File:Projectmailer.net-pm-Special-ListFiles-AAD-Time_Snippet.JPG|"(B)ecause ''Mailer'' is a born writer, it is a heady ride"
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

==Letters==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:19650417 Letter.jpg|Granville Hicks, in his review of Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' [''SR'', March 20], tells us that Mailer’s main character has no reality, the other characters are “dummies,” the writing is sloppy, and the plot is absurd. One might say the same about Dostoevsky’s ''Notes from the Underground''. Perhaps ''An American Dream'' is not a great book, but it is most certainly not a “bad joke.” It contains scenes of great power and pages of brilliant imagery. It holds one’s interest. It is an entertaining book to read. ~W. K. MASON, Madison, Wis.
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>
== Reviews ==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:Buckley_Miami_Herald.JPG|William F. Buckley, Jr. states: “it was {{NM}} who developed the cult of the Hipster—the truly modern American who lets the bleary world go by doing whatever it bloody well likes, because nothing it does can upset the Hipsters’ inexhaustible Cool.” (''The Miami Herald'', September 26, 1965) [[There's Hope in Mailer|Read More »]]
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

[[Category:Projects]]

File:19650401 Herald Tribune.JPG

2019-04-18T18:56:19Z

Waebo:

Talk:An American Dream Expanded/to do

2019-04-18T18:18:40Z

Waebo:

* All pages should use {{tl|aade-sm}} somewhere on the page. This gives the appropriate categories and a banner about the page’s part on the project
* Add bibliography entries (Appendix II.doc in Letters directory).
* Incorporate items in the Misc directory from the shared drive.
** Add to Gallery. (Everyone could do '''one''' of these, at least.)added 1 to gallery and 1 to snippets--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
::''(friends, I'm listing those files in Misc., please sign and strike off when you have uploaded them to PM for ease of recon)''~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 19:38, 16 April 2019 (UTC))
:#<s>196505 PW Best Sellers</s> --[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:38, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19640302</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:56, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650125 Royalty Statement</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:33, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650310 Book Week News</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650315 Invitation</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:# 19650316 Advertising Copy
:# 19650322 Publishers Weekly Currents
:# 19650322 Publishers Weekly
:# 19650401 Herald Tribune
:# 19650403 New Republic
:# 19650418 Best Sellers
:#<s>19650514 Envelope</s>~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 13:45, 17 April 2019 (EDT))''Friends, I do not have access to a pdf to jpg/png convertor, so I uploaded this but only in pdf and it doesn't seem usable in that form. If you have access or a work around please advice or take and make happen''[[File:Cry.png|20px]]''Thanks!'' ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 14:54, 17 April 2019 (EDT))
::[[reply to|Dmcgonagill]] I have a pdf to jpeg file converter. [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 10:13, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
::{{reply to|Waebo}} Awesome! You want to convert my envelope one for me then? Or is it something you can share?~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 11:11, 18 April 2019 (EDT))
:#<s> 19650923 Mary Bancroft Letter- I will add </s> [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] --[[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 11:36, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>20190302_L The New York -I will add</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)Dillbug
:# 20190302_002 [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# 20190302 Harper's plan [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# 20190302_there's SOI park [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# Cover Mock-up --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:#<s>Snippet - I will do</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)
:# Trotter Letter
* Secure permissions for essays.
* Post full-text essays.
* Secure permissions for reviews.
* Post full-text reviews. Working on Didion ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 23:21, 15 April 2019 (UTC))<s>Working on Buckley</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC) Working on Dana, North American Review JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) {{reply to|Grlucas}} Should these full reviews be transcribed or posted as PDF and do we need to secure permission? Thanks, [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) (UTC)
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
* Add notes and other research, like identifying important people, events, publications, etc.
** Links to Wikipedia when appropriate.
* Post credits. (I'll do this near the project’s completion. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:21, 5 April 2019 (UTC))

An American Dream Expanded

2019-04-18T18:12:51Z

Waebo: /* Gallery */

File:19650923-Mary.Bancroft.Letter.JPG

2019-04-18T18:08:39Z

Waebo:

An American Dream Expanded

2019-04-18T18:05:08Z

Waebo: /* Gallery */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:''An American Dream'' Expanded}}
{{Aad-tabs}}

{{notice|This project is coming in the spring of 2019. If you’d like to contribute, see the [[Talk:An American Dream Expanded|discussion page]]. }}

[[File:65-7c.jpg|thumb|Dust wrapper of the British edition published by Andre Deutsch on 26 April, 1965.]]
{{cquote|''An American Dream'' is Norman Mailer’s first novel in nine years. He wrote it at a high pitch, each chapter appearing in ''Esquire'' while he was still at work on the next: a method now unusual but common enough among the great novelists of the nineteenth century, which contributed much to the quivering tension of the story.

The theme of challenge suggested by Mailer’s choice of this method is very much a part of the book. His hero challenges the Devil himself. Stephen Rojack kills his wife, lies to the police, is interrogated by them, discovers a woman, his wife’s opposite, in whom he senses the truth and strength he longs for. The ingredients of his story are deliberately those familiar from many a thriller or movie-murder—suspense, sex—but Rojack lives these experiences with a fierce intensity which shatters their popular image and reveals extraordinary meanings behind them. He is a man who believes in God and the Devil, and to whom God is courage, not love. His actions become explosively significant because he feels that any one of them might open the crack through which the Devil’s power, or that of God, could flood in.

Simply on the level of ‘what will happen next?’ ''An American Dream'' grips relentlessly: will the suspicious police pounce on Rojack? Will he and Cherry, his new girl, be able to
establish the love which has begun to grow between them? But beyond this there is the immense exhilaration springing from the boldness and passion with which Norman Mailer tackles his central theme of man as the battleground for God and the Devil.

This is his most exciting book since ''The Naked and the Dead'', which became a modern classic and has sold, over two and a half million copies in the English language.|source=Dust jacket text, British edition, Andre Deutsch, April 1965.}}

==Gallery==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:AAD-Esquire.jpg|Title and opening paragraph of the first installment of ''An American Dream'' in ''Esquire'', January 1964.
|File:AAD-Proofs.jpg|Cover of uncorrected page proof of the Dial Press edition.
|File:65-7.jpg|Front and spine of dust wrapper of the Dial Press edition.
|File:1964 NM by Ann Barry.jpg|Back panel of dust wrapper of the Dial press edition: photograph of Mailer by Anne Barry.
|File:Aad-ad.jpg|Advertisement in the ''New York Times'' for the ''Esquire'' serial version, 22 April 1964.
|File:AAD-Cover-Mockup.jpg|An early ''AAD'' cover mockup.
|File:Saturday Review.jpg|Cover of 20 March 1965 ''Saturday Review'' depicting Mailer.
|File:AAD-Bestsellers.jpg|Best seller list in ''Book Week'', 30 May 1965, showing the novel in No. 10 position.
|File:19650315-Invitation.png|Invitation to the reception for the novel at the Village Vanguard in New York on publication day, 15 March 1965.
|File:19660829-Invitation-Screening.png|An invitation to the screening of the film ''An American Dream''.
|File:AAD-Movie-Ad.jpg|Advertisement for the film version of the novel from Warner Brothers Pressbook.
|File:1964-Bookseller.jpg|Cover of the British trade journal, ''The Bookseller'', 26 December 1964, featuring the forthcoming British edition of ''An American Dream'', published by Andre Deutsch.
|File:1964-PW.jpg|Cover of ''Publishers’ Weekly'' featuring the forthcoming Dial Press version of ''An American Dream'', 12 October 1964.
|File:65-7a.jpg|Cover of the third Dell paperback edition, published February 1970.
|File:65-7b.jpg|Paperback.
|File:65-7d.jpg|Paperback.
|File:65-7-Chinese Cover.jpg|Chinese hardcover.
|File:65-7-Vintage Cover.png|Vintage cover.
|File:65-7-Harper Ed.jpg|Harper cover.
|File:20190302_L_The_New_York_Time.JPG|Advertisement in the ''NYT''.
|File:PW_May_1965.JPG|Best seller list of the week in ''Publishers Weekly'', May 1965, showing ''[[An American Dream]]'' in No. 6 position.
|File:19640302_Rights_and_Permissions.JPG|Announcement of Warner Brothers studios purchasing the movie rights to ''[[An American Dream]]'', March 2, 1964
|File:19650130.jpg|Book Week News
<gallery>
19650923-Mary.Bancroft.Letter.jpg|Mary Bancroft Letter
</gallery>
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

==Blurbs and Snippets==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:1963-AAD-Snippet.jpg|“I’ll finish my book in another year of bleeding at the typewriter,” Norman Mailer sighed at the Spindletop the other night. (1963)
|File:1963-NYW.jpg|'''Norman Mailer''' has just come into a large chunk of money. Dial, the book publishers, have given him a reported $125,000 for the rights to his as yet untitled and unwritten novel. . . . (1963)
|File:Projectmailer.net-pm-Special-ListFiles-AAD-Time_Snippet.JPG|"(B)ecause ''Mailer'' is a born writer, it is a heady ride"
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

==Letters==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:19650417 Letter.jpg|Granville Hicks, in his review of Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' [''SR'', March 20], tells us that Mailer’s main character has no reality, the other characters are “dummies,” the writing is sloppy, and the plot is absurd. One might say the same about Dostoevsky’s ''Notes from the Underground''. Perhaps ''An American Dream'' is not a great book, but it is most certainly not a “bad joke.” It contains scenes of great power and pages of brilliant imagery. It holds one’s interest. It is an entertaining book to read. ~W. K. MASON, Madison, Wis.
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>
== Reviews ==
{{Gallery
|width=200
|height=200
|align=left
|File:Buckley_Miami_Herald.JPG|William F. Buckley, Jr. states: “it was {{NM}} who developed the cult of the Hipster—the truly modern American who lets the bleary world go by doing whatever it bloody well likes, because nothing it does can upset the Hipsters’ inexhaustible Cool.” (''The Miami Herald'', September 26, 1965) [[There's Hope in Mailer|Read More »]]
}}
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

[[Category:Projects]]

File:0001.jpg

2019-04-18T14:20:54Z

Waebo:

Talk:An American Dream Expanded/to do

2019-04-18T14:13:42Z

Waebo: reply

* All pages should use {{tl|aade-sm}} somewhere on the page. This gives the appropriate categories and a banner about the page’s part on the project
* Add bibliography entries (Appendix II.doc in Letters directory).
* Incorporate items in the Misc directory from the shared drive.
** Add to Gallery. (Everyone could do '''one''' of these, at least.)added 1 to gallery and 1 to snippets--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
::''(friends, I'm listing those files in Misc., please sign and strike off when you have uploaded them to PM for ease of recon)''~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 19:38, 16 April 2019 (UTC))
:#<s>196505 PW Best Sellers</s> --[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:38, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19640302</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 12:56, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s> 19650125 Royalty Statement</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:33, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650310 Book Week News</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>19650315 Invitation</s>--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 13:40, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:# 19650316 Advertising Copy
:# 19650322 Publishers Weekly Currents
:# 19650322 Publishers Weekly
:# 19650401 Herald Tribune
:# 19650403 New Republic
:# 19650418 Best Sellers
:#<s>19650514 Envelope</s>~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 13:45, 17 April 2019 (EDT))''Friends, I do not have access to a pdf to jpg/png convertor, so I uploaded this but only in pdf and it doesn't seem usable in that form. If you have access or a work around please advice or take and make happen''[[File:Cry.png|20px]]''Thanks!'' ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 14:54, 17 April 2019 (EDT))
::[[reply to | Dmcgonagill]] I have a pdf to jpeg file converter. [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 10:13, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:# 19650923 Mary Bancroft Letter- I will add </s> [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] --[[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 11:36, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
:#<s>20190302_L The New York -I will add</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)Dillbug
:# 20190302_002 [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# 20190302 Harper's plan [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# 20190302_there's SOI park [[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]]) 23:37, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
:# Cover Mock-up --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:#<s>Snippet - I will do</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 18:21, 16 April 2019 (EDT)
:# Trotter Letter
* Secure permissions for essays.
* Post full-text essays.
* Secure permissions for reviews.
* Post full-text reviews. Working on Didion ~~([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 23:21, 15 April 2019 (UTC))<s>Working on Buckley</s>[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 16:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC) Working on Dana, North American Review JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) {{reply to|Grlucas}} Should these full reviews be transcribed or posted as PDF and do we need to secure permission? Thanks, [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) (UTC)
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Huffman-Jungian Approach --I will do this one, JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
:# Saturday Review -I will do this one JVbird [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]])
* Add notes and other research, like identifying important people, events, publications, etc.
** Links to Wikipedia when appropriate.
* Post credits. (I'll do this near the project’s completion. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:21, 5 April 2019 (UTC))

Talk:An American Dream Expanded/to do

2019-04-17T15:36:30Z

Waebo:

User:Waebo/sandbox

2019-04-14T02:05:53Z

Waebo:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Boiling the Archetypal Pot, Norman Mailer's American Dream}}
{{byline|last=EVANS|first=TIMOTHY}}

IN ONE Of HIS RECENT ESSAYS, Leslie Fiedler proposes that a new technology in a New World made both necessary and possible "the manufacture, the mass production, and the mass distribution of dreams.” Some of these were "dreams disguised as goods,” but of course they also reached their public dressed as art, poor and vulgar art, by and large; ”but what,” as Fiedler asks, ”can one expect of a population descended horn the culturally dispossessed of all nations of the world?"</br>

An image to reflect in accelerating expectations, to judge by the' Ragged Dicks and Tattered Toms it favored during the first great age of mass literature in America. Alger’s stereotype of struggle-and-success, and others like it, resonated with the dreams his readers dreamed; and behind those dreams was a latch in worldly success as a measure of individual humanity that reached back past the puritans’ doctrine of the calling to the Faustian core of Protestant ethics itself. But by the time the crash of 1f29 imposed its reality on the nation, a tradition had emerged among serious novelists that set them in imaginative opposition to the stereotype of struggle-and-success. Those who published the decisive works of the twenties and thirties—Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Scott FitzGerald, John Stein- beck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—a1l of them took on in some significant measure the task of demythification.</br>

They struggled and, in true American fashion, they succeeded. They succeeded so thoroughly that only the grossest hacks find rite old stereotype a challenging target anymore. But if the example of Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins arrests to rite success of the stereotype’s enemies, it also raises a question about its obvious persistence in the popular imagination. Has the dream of success become a reflex of the mass psyche, a subliminal myth that no longer needs to be established or nourished in the public imagination? Is it somehow infused soon after, birth, or even passed on genetically, along with stronger teeth anal longer limbs?</br>

Such conjectures seem mild when compared to the hypothesis Norman Other broaches in his own bout with the stereotype, An American Dream. Here, a witty variant of the young man on the make is thwarted in an urban gothic melodrama that verges on vaudeville: stock characters and tacky extras abound, and the style is slaphappy with significance. Like all potboilers, it was intended to exceed the expectations of its readers, and judging by the critical response it stimulated, it was almost unanimously successful. "Mailer’s novel is bad,” wrote Stanley Edgar Hyman at the time it was published, ”in that absolute fashion that makes it unlikely that he could ever have written anything good.”' Other critics held back from this extremity, but even Mailer’s defenders were forced to the conclusion that An American Dream was a parody. For it is in many ways a shoddy and cynical performance, hacked out on schedule for serial publication, littered with barbarisms, and drastically over-motivated. It is easily dismissed on technical grounds: told in the first person, the novel relies on its hero’s rhetorical mysticism for both its narrative play and its thematic overplay. Since the ironies are at his expense, he must tell us more than he can plausibly know, which embarrasses the dream without its disguise. It also undercuts the authority of Mai1er’s hypothesis at its source. This is too bad because it’s one of his gaudier conceits that the stereotype of struggle-and-success is actually an archetype in disguise.</br>

An upside-down archetype, one must immediately add, for the center of this novel is an inverted Oedipa1 compulsion. Just as. in Freud’s scheme, the murder of the father and incest with the mother initiated a new social order based on taboos surrounding those transgressions, so here, in An American Dream.•, Mailer’s formulation requires equally actual but reversed transgressions. Defined as she is in terms of Stephen Rojack's ambitions, his wealthy wife Deborah is the mother of his promise. When he kills her, he has the feeling he has pushed open “an enormous door." “I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. “ The act of murder changes the key of his consciousness and breaks him through into an archetypa1 region of the psyche. Jung describes the "instinctive data of the dark primitive psyche” as the component material of the archetype, and it is there that there novel moves, into ”the real, the invisible cooks of consciousness,” when Stephen strangles his wife.</br>

This is the territory Mailer staked out for himself in his Advertisements, which ended with a "prologue to a long novel” that would dramatize the themes he’d been discussing—"murder, suicide, orgy, psychosis,” as he listed them. The novel has never appeared, but the promise was tentative in the first place ”I do not know in all simple bitterness if I can make it," he wrote and the prologue ends in the conditional. But the work he had in mind was to be a "tale of heroes and villains, murderers and suicides, orgy-masters, perverts, and passionate lovers.” lt was to be organized into a narrative so radically schizoid that in place of a hero it would stage a contest among three candidates for that role. And, if the prologue provides an accurate sample, it was to be written in a rhetoric extreme enough to engage its author’s insight that “we hover at the edge of an orgy of language, the nihilism of meaning fair upon us.” The novel's projected starting point was to be a party at the home of one of Mailer’s candidates, Marion Faye, the “master pimp" of The Deer Park. His guests are said to constitute “an artist’s assortment of those contradictory and varied categories of people who made up the obdurate materials of new sociological alloy.” His home is described as an old rambling mansion still "alive with every murderous sleep it had ever suffered;” a wind-beaten, dream-ridden place not far from where the first Puritans landed, ”a house which had the capacity to set free, one upon the other, the dank sore-rotted assassins in the dungeons of a
family’s character." And his purposes are evidently murderous, for Marion Faye, we are told, "had come to the point in his life, as he had foreseen in terror many a time, when the 8ux of his development, the discovery of the new beauties of his self-expression, depended on murdering a man, a particular man.”</br>

This, then, is what we can see of Mailer's program for ”discovering the psychic anatomy of our republic." Whatever it sounds like in summary, it must have seemed to Mailer a way out of the imaginative impasse which afflicted him during the composition of Barbary Shore. He wrote that book as a Marxist whose commitment was still developing but whose "conscious themes” were solidly' political. "But my unconscious was much more interested in other matters,” as Mailer once observed in an interview referring to the themes discussed in Advertisement. ”Since the gulf between these conscious and unconscious themes was vast and quite resistant to any quick literary coupling," he went on, “the tension to gel a bridge across resulted in the peculiar hothouse atmosphere of Barbary Shore.. . And of course this difficulty kept haunting me from then on in all the work I did afterward.</br>

If this novel is what it appears to be, its hero is the image of his author, and not only as "a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation." For Stephen Rojack has seen his great expectations dissipated and has reached the conclusion that he is a failure. The illusions he has lost were founded upon a moment of wartime heroism during which, possessed by some moonlight genius, he’d been able to overreach himself. This moment flourished into a term in the House of Representatives, during which he met Deborah, but his "secret frightened romance with the phases of the moon"’ drew him out of the public life and into a long professional tailspin. Rojack resembles Mailer’s first hero, Robert Hearn, who was also driven "to make the world in his own image and impose his will upon it” but was finally forced to the discovery that "he does not have the passion or the confidence or the ruthlessness it takes; his intelligence is too skeptical, his disenchantment ... too thorough.'" But he resembles more closely one of Marion Faye’s rivals for the office of hero in Mailer’s projected novel: Rojack is, in fact, the realization of Dr. Joyce, the psychoanalyst, described in the prologue as a man who had become so overextended beyond his humane means, and had so compromised his career, his profession, and his intimate honor that he was contemplating suicide." But Dr. Joyce’s thematic responsibilities have fattened over the years, for he has been fudged with Marion Faye in An American Dream with the result that Stephen Rojack can never ghost away into the lure of suicide completely, for he must also walk about in most murderous need "with a chest full of hatred and a brain jammed to burst.“ So the dualities Mailer meant to dramatize in two radically different characters must fight for dominance within the limits of one. Rojack says de finds this both exhausting and exhilarating, but he “cannot even bear to explain” how he came to resemble Shawn Sergius, the third of Mailer’s contenders for the title of hero.</br>

Since Rojack is some distance from being ”the only creative person- ality ever to dominate television” projected in Mailer’s prologue, his talk show amounts to a harmless literary allusion. But by merging the motives of Marion Faye with those of Dr. Joyce, Mailer produces a thematic muddle, for the articulated distinction of his original design has been lost. Murder was the relationship with. death which expressed, in Marion Pune, the fundamental cannibalism to which success reduced its representatives, while the terms of Manure entailed suicide in a man like Dr. Joyce. Having combined the two impulses or one character, Mailer produces a caricature of the imaginative method by which he isolated them in the first place, a method astutely formulated by Richard Poirier: "Divide the material, argue the differences, reach a kind of stalemate and call it a ‘mystery.’ ”* What happens in An American Dream is that hip and square, atheist and mystic, murderer and suicide--all the terms of Mailer’s dialectic—stew together until the differences melt away, any- thing at all becomes admissible, and an archetype comes boiling into view. By following the course of Rojack’s crisis, it will be possible to see how all this happens.</br>

He is a failure, then, incapable of realizing the potential of his marriage to an heiress, who despises him bitterly for his defeats. He wishes he could despise her for her wealth but knows chat he cannot completely, for it had, he remarks, “become the manifest of how unconsummated and unmasculine was the core of my force. It was like being married to a woman who would not relinquish her first lover.” That Deborah had not really relinquished her first lover she reveals just before her death. She tells Stephen she no longer loves him and remembers "the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things.” She has never told anyone about him, and she carries her secret with her when she dies; but Stephen later discovers that she was describing her father, who seduced her when she was fifteen. So Stephen has been a surrogate husband, at whom Deborah has clawed while she remained committed to her delicious father.</br>

If Deborah is a man-caring bitch, she is also a kind of goddess. Her relationship with Stephen brings to mind the myth of Attis and Cybele, hut Deborah is not a representation of any particular Goddess in myth or legend. She possesses many of the particular qualities of female deities in Celtic and classical mythology; cataloging the many parallels and references would be redundant. It will be quicker to examine one in particular, Diana, the Roman Goddess, who is Luna in heaven, Diana on earth, and Hecate in hell.</br>

It was Luna who presided over Stephen’s night of heroism during the war, endowing him with special powers of insight and observation and leaving him with minute and vivid memories. One of Stephen’s victims “whimpered 'Mutter,’ one yelp from the first memory of the womb, and down he went into his own blood.” The association of death, mother, and the power of the moon is thus engraved on Stephen’s consciousness, which is why, when suicide beckons to him, it is the silent voice of the moon he hears. When he visits Deborah for the last time after pulling back from the seductions of Luna, it seems to him not at all exceptional ... that Deborah had been in touch with the moon and now had the word.”</br>

Of the other two representations of Diana, Hecate, the goddess of the streets and toads, is also the patroness of enchantments. Stephen’s example of Deborah’s power to lay a curse relates her to Hecate:</br>

Once after a fight with her, I had been given traffic tickets three times in fifteen minutes, once for going down a one-way street, once for jumping a red light, and once because the policeman in the last car did not like my
eye and decided I was drunk. That had all been in the form of a warning from Deborah, I was certain of that. I could see her waiting alone in bed, waving her long fingers languidly to spark the obedient diabolisms and traffic officers at her command.</br>

It is into the street that Stephen casts Deborah's corpse, and she seems to linger there, where “there is ambush everywhere," to torment him after her death.</br>

As for Diana, she is represented as tall, her hair dark ("She was a handsome woman, Deborah, she was big. With high heels she stood at least an inch over me. She had a huge mass of black hair.”) She is the goddess of the hunt and mistress of the woods. Stephen includes in his inventory of Deborah’s superiorities her skill at hunting—she considers the only suitable hunting companion for her would be”somebody who’s divine as a hunter"—and presents it in supernatural terms:</br>

She did not see a forest like others. No, out of the cool and the damp, the scent of forest odor aromatic and soft with rot, Deborah drew a mood—she knew the spirit which created attention in the grove, she told me once she could sense that spirit watching her, and when it was replaced by something else, also watching her, well, there was an animal. And so there was.</br>

So Deborah is a bitch and a goddess, and she's daddy's girl, and to all this Stephen is simply not equal. The opportunity she once held out to him has curdled into spite and scorn, and her witching powers represent, to a man who has steeped himself in death and dread, a most intimate threat. When she threatens him with divorce, which would leave his spirit in its torment without fulfilling his ambitions, he murders her. The killing itself is half-tantrum and half-orgasm and when it‘s done Stephen, exhilarated, equips himself for the struggle with the police and the media that will follow the death of an heiress by "giving the maid a bang."</br>

The maid has her spirits, too. She communicates to him sexually some of her qualities: "a host of the Devil’s best gifts were coming to me, mendacity, guile, a fine-edged cupidity for the stroke which steals, the wit to trick authority.” Afterward he is capable of viewing Deborah’s corpse and feeling a mean rage more spiteful and controlled than the madness that had seized him before.</br>

She had spit on the future, my Deborah, she had spoiled my chance ... I had an impulse to go up to her and kick her ribs, grind my heel on her nose, drive the point of my shoe into her temple and kill her again, mill her good this time, kill her right. I stood there shuddering from the power of this desire, and comprehended that this was the first of the gifts I'd plucked from the alley, oh Jesus, and I sat down in a chair as if to master the new desires Ruta had sent my way.</br>

This mood and these desires stir in Stephen the energy and cunning he will need to get around the perils of the urban jungle into which he cases Deborah‘s body. And the city itself turns up a prize to lead him on and give him good heart. For it is on the street, in the grotesque traffic pileup that attends upon Deborah in the East River Drive, that Stephen encounters the nightclub singer, Cherry. With the swift logic of a dream, they fall in love and agree to marry literally overnight, end Stephen feels a new life beginning within him, “sweet and perilous and so hard to fol1ow.” Redemption seems to beckon them both. Stephen will become a husband and a father and do the work he has not yet attempted, turning Freud upside down in a twenty-volume work of existential psychology; Cherry will choose lady over tramp and be a wife and mother. The presence within them promises that and speaks to Stephen of “the meaning of love for those who had betrayed it” ; he understands the meaning and says, “I think we have to be good,’ by which I meant that we would have to be brave."</br>

How brave he will need to be becomes clear to him after he is freed from the police by some unnamed intercession that can only have been the power of his father-in-law, Bernard Oswald Kelly. However well Ruta’s gifts may have equipped him for dealing with the ponce and the press, they are, he senses, unlikely to serve him very well against Kelly, from whom he must now free himself. And Cherry is not free either, it seems, for her former lover, the Negro singer Shago Martin, returns to devil her and Stephen. Given these complications, Stephen’s resolution to be brave diffuses. As he approaches Kelly’s, he feels three impulses: to return to Cherry and protect her from Shago, to go to Harlem and "pay for it” by enduring "some evil incident," and to confront and settle with Kelly. He understands that his choice in this must involve the exercise of the greatest possible courage if he is to make good on his vow to be brave. This allows him to reject his first impulse as being compromised by a desire to be with Cherry out of anxiety: "Some air of hurricane lay over my head.... She was my sanity, simple as that —and then I remembered the vow I had made in her bed.” But he doesn’t know which of the remaining impulses he fears more, Harlem or Kelly, and so lie doesn’t decide, and lets the taxi drift past Harlem. On the elevator to Kelly’s suite, though, he seems to conclude that he was in truth more frightened of Harlem. A voice inside him urges him there, and he pleads with it that he be left alone to love Cherry "some way not altogether deranged and doomed.... Let me love her and be sensible as well.” He dismisses the voice "and something departed from me, some etched image of Cherry’s face turned to mist.”</br>

It is in this frame of mind that he begins his ordeal with Kelly. Ste- phen’s progress to this point has hem an impossibly tortuous sequence of struggles and victories. He has broken Deborah’s hold on him and kept the police, her minions, at bay. He has suffered his losses—his future on te1evision, his position at university —without panic or despair and overcome Shago to win Cherry, however provisionally, for himself. His moments with her have given him hope, however qualified, just as his time with Ruta brought him the powers he needed at the early stages of his trial. But in Bernard Oswald Kelly he faces his most formidable adversary, and it is here that the inverted Oedipal compulsion surfaces fully.</br>

For Bernard Oswald Kelly is the father figure in Stephen's dream, the mate of the dominating mother, Deborah. And what Kelly proposes, or seems to Stephen to propose, is the completion of the taboo: incest, the pact of guilt between the murder and the mate of the victim. This is the “real thing” that Kelly speaks of at the beginning of his conversation with Stephen; this is what he has in mind when he talks of becoming friends. "I have confidence," He tells Stephen. "We’re closer than you expect.”</br>

And they are close. Both are Manichaeans, believing in a God of pure spirit and a demiurge that reigns over matter. Both are upstarts, Kelly successful in using his wife's wealth and power, Stephen a failure, and both have had dealings with women who possess and cause them to possess magical powers. The dynamics of their meeting suggests the relationship between the heroes of the naturalistic novel and those of the novel of "moral earnestness” as Mailer describes it in Cannibals and Christians.</br>

Where the original heroes of naturalism had been bold, self-centered, close to tragic, and up to their nostrils in their exertions to advance their own life and force the webs of society, so the hero of moral earnestness, the hero Herzog and the hero Levin in Mahmud’s A New Life, are men who repre- sent the contrary—passive, timid, other-directed, pathetic, up to the nostrils
in anguish: the world is stronger than they are; suicide calls.</br>

Behind this confrontation is the debt of guilt for Deborah’s death, and the actual subject of discussion is the portioning out of that guilt. The discussion occurs between the father and the son who has had visited upon him the elder’s sins, a point Kelly brings up himself. He makes it clear to Stephen that he has a share in the guilt for Deborah’s death because he has had a part in making it happen. "I’m just as guilty, after all,” he say's. "I was a brute to her. She visited that brutishness back on you.”</br>

And so the meeting between the two men is an effort on Kelly’s part to seal a pact of guilt, to "bury the ghost of Deborah by gorging on her corpse.” And one of the components of the pact is the homosexual act pro- posed to Hearn by General Cummins in The Naked and the Dead. Like Hearn before him, Stephen will be unable to consent, to follow the logic of one part of his actions through. There is, though, an exchange between the two men: "Desire came off Delly to jump the murderer of his beast, and unfamiliar desire stirred in me. echo of that desire to ear with Ruts on Deborah’s corpse.” This combination of outrages—incest and cannibalism—represents an inversion of what in Freud’s analysis was the "memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions, and religion”—the ritual meal shared by the killers of the patriarch.’ Kelly’s proposition offers Stephen the opportunity to achieve in fact what lie wishes to accomplish in his great work: turning Freud on his head.</br>

Part of the reason he cannot take this chance is that Stephen can say, with Fitzgerald, that "the very rich are different from you and me.” ln a note to the relevant chapter of Totem and Taboo Freud notes that murder and incest, offenses against the sacred laws of blood relationship, are the only ones recognized as crimes by the primitive community. In pulling Stephen within the webs of the summit, Kelly frees him from the Page of the community as it is expressed in the police stations and the tabloids. Back of all this is the Marxist orientation that ”quantity changes quality," an aphorism broadcast during one of Stephen’s television shows. Kelly theologizes along the same lines:</br>

God and the devil are very attentive to people at the summit. 1 don’t know if they stir much in the average man's daily stew . . . but do you expect God or the devil left Lenin or Hitler or Churchill alone? No. They bid for favors and exact revenge... . There's nothing but magic at the top. It’s the little secret that a few of us keep to ourselves, but that, my friend, is one reason why it’s not so easy to get to the very top. Because you have to be ready to deal with the One or the Other, and Shae’s too much for the average good man on his way. Sooner or later, he decides to be mediocre, and put up with the middle.</br>

Stephen is here being initiated into the secrets of the summit, but the signs are he’d prefer to put up with the middle. His inability to “pitch and tear and squat and lick, swill and grovel” with his father-in-law is connected with his inability to take the plunge at the moon’s bidding. He is unfit for the evil heroism that has been thrust upon him as a final result of his wartime moment and its attendant glimpse beyond the pale. Confronted with the expiatory completion of the taboo circle proposed by Kelly, Stephen falters and realizes he is caught in a position he cannot redeem. "I wanted to escape from that intelligence which let me know of murders in one direction and conceive of visits to Cherry in another, I wanted to be free of magic, the tongue of the Devil, the dread of the Lord, I wanted to be some sort of rational man again, nailed tight to details, reasonable, blind to the reach of the seas.”</br>

It is this "rational man" in Stephen that has allied itself with the “1ady" in Cherry after having contracted with Ruta, the devil's thrall. After his moment with Cherry the divided nature of his commitments dawns fully upon him: "Like a petty criminal I had sold my jewels last night to the Devil, and promised them again this morning to some child's whisper. I had a literal sense of seed out on separate voyages, into the sea of Cherry's womb, into the rich extinctions of Ruta's kitchen ."</br>

Feeling this way, Stephen cannot complete the job he has begun by murdering Deborah . He is literally of two minds, and three times in the novel we see him teeter-tottering at the edge of the abyss, drawn, in different ways each time, to perfect a relationship with suicide. Each time he draws back. Realizing the possibilities of death, he is nonetheless drawn to life. In another of Mailer's formulations, he is hip and square at once, simultaneously an atheist and a mystic.</br>

In the dialogue between the atheist and the mystic, the atheist is on the side of life, rational life, undialectical life-since he conceives of death as emptiness he can, no matter how weary or despairing, wish for nothing but more life; his pride is that he does not transpose his weakness and spiritual fatigue into a romantic longing for death, for such appreciation of death is then all
too capable of being elaborated by his imagination into a universe of meaningful structure and moral orchestration.</br>

These observations from "The White Negro" supply precisely the terms of Stephen's self-division. In his wartime experience, he discovered that death is as full of possibility, is perhaps even more dangerous, and consequently more full of possibility, than life, and this discovery leads him away from the will for life, the atheist's ability to think "that death was zero, death was everybody's emptiness." This sense of things is developed further on Kelly's balcony, to the point that Stephen can feel “some part of the heavens, some long cool vault at the entrance, a sense of vast calm altogether aware of me. 'God exists,' I thought." But just
as the call to seal the pact is too much for another part of him, so too something in him, some atheist, holds him back at the brink of suicide. He buckles and rebels, so that at the end of hi~ encounter with the moor on Kelly's parapet he retreats, pleading with the mystic inside that he had "lain with madness long enough." He rushes to his atheist's salvation, Cherry, only to see her die, the fulfillment of a warning from his mystic's voice on the way to Kelly's summit.</br>

So Stephen Rojack loses the square's life by refusing the hipster's gambit, misses the sweet of fulfilled monogamy by failing to lay its corrupted Freudian ghost. It's a measure of the novel's insufficiency that the terms of its hero's defeat arise out of a subplot so clearly cooked up, so carelessly improvised, as the romance between Stephen and Cherry; but other measures have been taken, and still, others will no doubt follow. For An American Dream is the closest Mailer has come to fulfilling the great imaginative project he advertised so vividly fifteen years age. Something happened to the art of the novel in postwar America, as Joseph Heller, Mailer 's exact contemporary, might be construed as saying in the title of his second book. But so can all the rest of the returned war veterans
be construed as saying, one way and another; only: Mailer among them has expressed and embodied his imaginative plight so vividly in a
single work. Given the failure of postwar realism, this is probably as good a way as any to "create an image of our time which will und undoubtedly stand as authoritative for this generation."' But it also parodies the thematic conceptions which Mailer hoped would support a novel intended to carry on the work of Dostoevski and Tolstoy , Stendhal and Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway. And this raises the possibility that Mailer may end his career as novelist the way so many American writers before him have done, "by travestying his own style and themes," in Fiedler's words, "by mocking himself."</br>

{{Template:Aade-sm}}
==Notes==
{{notelist}}
1. Leslie Fiedler, "The Dream of the New," in David .Madden, ed., American
Dreams. American Nightmares (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, 1970) , p. 21.
2. Stanley Edgar Hi-roan, "Norm an Mailer's Yummy Rump ," in Leo Brandy . ed.,
Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice:-Hall,
1972) , p. 104.
3. Steven Marcus, "An interview with Norman Mailer," in Braudy, Norma1J
Mailer, p. 29.
4. Ibid.
5. Fiedler, in Braudy, Norman Mailer, p. 27.
6. lhab Hassan, Radical Innocence (New York: Harperr & Row. 1996) . p. 147.
7. Richard Poirier, "The Ups and Downs of Norman Mailer," in Braudy, Norman,
Mailer, p. 17 3.
8. Sigmund Freud. Totem and Taboo , in A. A. Brill. ed., The Basic writing of
Sigmund Freud (New York: Modem Library. 1938), p. 916
9. John \Y/. Aldridge, "The Energy of New Success," in Braudy. Norman Mailer,
p. 119.

User:Waebo/sandbox

2019-04-14T02:04:21Z

Waebo:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Boiling the Archetypal Pot, Norman Mailer's American Dream}}
{{byline|last=EVANS|first=TIMOTHY}}

IN ONE Of HIS RECENT ESSAYS, Leslie Fiedler proposes that a new technology in a New World made both necessary and possible "the manufacture, the mass production, and the mass distribution of dreams.” Some of these were "dreams disguised as goods,” but of course they also reached their public dressed as art, poor and vulgar art, by and large; ”but what,” as Fiedler asks, ”can one expect of a population descended horn the culturally dispossessed of all nations of the world?"</br>

An image to reflect in accelerating expectations, to judge by the' Ragged Dicks and Tattered Toms it favored during the first great age of mass literature in America. Alger’s stereotype of struggle-and-success, and others like it, resonated with the dreams his readers dreamed; and behind those dreams was a latch in worldly success as a measure of individual humanity that reached back past the puritans’ doctrine of the calling to the Faustian core of Protestant ethics itself. But by the time the crash of 1f29 imposed its reality on the nation, a tradition had emerged among serious novelists that set them in imaginative opposition to the stereotype of struggle-and-success. Those who published the decisive works of the twenties and thirties—Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Scott FitzGerald, John Stein- beck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—a1l of them took on in some significant measure the task of demythification.</br>

They struggled and, in true American fashion, they succeeded. They succeeded so thoroughly that only the grossest hacks find rite old stereotype a challenging target anymore. But if the example of Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins arrests to rite success of the stereotype’s enemies, it also raises a question about its obvious persistence in the popular imagination. Has the dream of success become a reflex of the mass psyche, a subliminal myth that no longer needs to be established or nourished in the public imagination? Is it somehow infused soon after, birth, or even passed on genetically, along with stronger teeth anal longer limbs?</br> '

Such conjectures seem mild when compared to the hypothesis Norman Other broaches in his own bout with the stereotype, An American Dream. Here, a witty variant of the young man on the make is thwarted in an urban gothic melodrama that verges on vaudeville: stock characters and tacky extras abound, and the style is slaphappy with significance. Like all potboilers, it was intended to exceed the expectations of its readers, and judging by the critical response it stimulated, it was almost unanimously successful. "Mailer’s novel is bad,” wrote Stanley Edgar Hyman at the time it was published, ”in that absolute fashion that makes it unlikely that he could ever have written anything good.”' Other critics held back from this extremity, but even Mailer’s defenders were forced to the conclusion that An American Dream was a parody. For it is in many ways a shoddy and cynical performance, hacked out on schedule for serial publication, littered with barbarisms, and drastically over-motivated. It is easily dismissed on technical grounds: told in the first person, the novel relies on its hero’s rhetorical mysticism for both its narrative play and its thematic overplay. Since the ironies are at his expense, he must tell us more than he can plausibly know, which embarrasses the dream without its disguise. It also undercuts the authority of Mai1er’s hypothesis at its source. This is too bad because it’s one of his gaudier conceits that the stereotype of struggle-and-success is actually an archetype in disguise.</br>

An upside-down archetype, one must immediately add, for the center of this novel is an inverted Oedipa1 compulsion. Just as. in Freud’s scheme, the murder of the father and incest with the mother initiated a new social order based on taboos surrounding those transgressions, so here, in An American Dream.•, Mailer’s formulation requires equally actual but reversed transgressions. Defined as she is in terms of Stephen Rojack's ambitions, his wealthy wife Deborah is the mother of his promise. When he kills her, he has the feeling he has pushed open “an enormous door." “I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. “ The act of murder changes the key of his consciousness and breaks him through into an archetypa1 region of the psyche. Jung describes the "instinctive data of the dark primitive psyche” as the component material of the archetype, and it is there that there novel moves, into ”the real, the invisible cooks of consciousness,” when Stephen strangles his wife.</br>

This is the territory Mailer staked out for himself in his Advertisements, which ended with a "prologue to a long novel” that would dramatize the themes he’d been discussing—"murder, suicide, orgy, psychosis,” as he listed them. The novel has never appeared, but the promise was tentative in the first place ”I do not know in all simple bitterness if I can make it," he wrote and the prologue ends in the conditional. But the work he had in mind was to be a "tale of heroes and villains, murderers and suicides, orgy-masters, perverts, and passionate lovers.” lt was to be organized into a narrative so radically schizoid that in place of a hero it would stage a contest among three candidates for that role. And, if the prologue provides an accurate sample, it was to be written in a rhetoric extreme enough to engage its author’s insight that “we hover at the edge of an orgy of language, the nihilism of meaning fair upon us.” The novel's projected starting point was to be a party at the home of one of Mailer’s candidates, Marion Faye, the “master pimp" of The Deer Park. His guests are said to constitute “an artist’s assortment of those contradictory and varied categories of people who made up the obdurate materials of new sociological alloy.” His home is described as an old rambling mansion still "alive with every murderous sleep it had ever suffered;” a wind-beaten, dream-ridden place not far from where the first Puritans landed, ”a house which had the capacity to set free, one upon the other, the dank sore-rotted assassins in the dungeons of a
family’s character." And his purposes are evidently murderous, for Marion Faye, we are told, "had come to the point in his life, as he had foreseen in terror many a time, when the 8ux of his development, the discovery of the new beauties of his self-expression, depended on murdering a man, a particular man.”</br>

This, then, is what we can see of Mailer's program for ”discovering the psychic anatomy of our republic." Whatever it sounds like in summary, it must have seemed to Mailer a way out of the imaginative impasse which afflicted him during the composition of Barbary Shore. He wrote that book as a Marxist whose commitment was still developing but whose "conscious themes” were solidly' political. "But my unconscious was much more interested in other matters,” as Mailer once observed in an interview referring to the themes discussed in Advertisement. ”Since the gulf between these conscious and unconscious themes was vast and quite resistant to any quick literary coupling," he went on, “the tension to gel a bridge across resulted in the peculiar hothouse atmosphere of Barbary Shore.. . And of course this difficulty kept haunting me from then on in all the work I did afterward.</br>

If this novel is what it appears to be, its hero is the image of his author, and not only as "a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation." For Stephen Rojack has seen his great expectations dissipated and has reached the conclusion that he is a failure. The illusions he has lost were founded upon a moment of wartime heroism during which, possessed by some moonlight genius, he’d been able to overreach himself. This moment flourished into a term in the House of Representatives, during which he met Deborah, but his "secret frightened romance with the phases of the moon"’ drew him out of the public life and into a long professional tailspin. Rojack resembles Mailer’s first hero, Robert Hearn, who was also driven "to make the world in his own image and impose his will upon it” but was finally forced to the discovery that "he does not have the passion or the confidence or the ruthlessness it takes; his intelligence is too skeptical, his disenchantment ... too thorough.'" But he resembles more closely one of Marion Faye’s rivals for the office of hero in Mailer’s projected novel: Rojack is, in fact, the realization of Dr. Joyce, the psychoanalyst, described in the prologue as a man who had become so overextended beyond his humane means, and had so compromised his career, his profession, and his intimate honor that he was contemplating suicide." But Dr. Joyce’s thematic responsibilities have fattened over the years, for he has been fudged with Marion Faye in An American Dream with the result that Stephen Rojack can never ghost away into the lure of suicide completely, for he must also walk about in most murderous need "with a chest full of hatred and a brain jammed to burst.“ So the dualities Mailer meant to dramatize in two radically different characters must fight for dominance within the limits of one. Rojack says de finds this both exhausting and exhilarating, but he “cannot even bear to explain” how he came to resemble Shawn Sergius, the third of Mailer’s contenders for the title of hero.</br>

Since Rojack is some distance from being ”the only creative person- ality ever to dominate television” projected in Mailer’s prologue, his talk show amounts to a harmless literary allusion. But by merging the motives of Marion Faye with those of Dr. Joyce, Mailer produces a thematic muddle, for the articulated distinction of his original design has been lost. Murder was the relationship with. death which expressed, in Marion Pune, the fundamental cannibalism to which success reduced its representatives, while the terms of Manure entailed suicide in a man like Dr. Joyce. Having combined the two impulses or one character, Mailer produces a caricature of the imaginative method by which he isolated them in the first place, a method astutely formulated by Richard Poirier: "Divide the material, argue the differences, reach a kind of stalemate and call it a ‘mystery.’ ”* What happens in An American Dream is that hip and square, atheist and mystic, murderer and suicide--all the terms of Mailer’s dialectic—stew together until the differences melt away, any- thing at all becomes admissible, and an archetype comes boiling into view. By following the course of Rojack’s crisis, it will be possible to see how all this happens.</br>

He is a failure, then, incapable of realizing the potential of his marriage to an heiress, who despises him bitterly for his defeats. He wishes he could despise her for her wealth but knows chat he cannot completely, for it had, he remarks, “become the manifest of how unconsummated and unmasculine was the core of my force. It was like being married to a woman who would not relinquish her first lover.” That Deborah had not really relinquished her first lover she reveals just before her death. She tells Stephen she no longer loves him and remembers "the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things.” She has never told anyone about him, and she carries her secret with her when she dies; but Stephen later discovers that she was describing her father, who seduced her when she was fifteen. So Stephen has been a surrogate husband, at whom Deborah has clawed while she remained committed to her delicious father.</br>

If Deborah is a man-caring bitch, she is also a kind of goddess. Her relationship with Stephen brings to mind the myth of Attis and Cybele, hut Deborah is not a representation of any particular Goddess in myth or legend. She possesses many of the particular qualities of female deities in Celtic and classical mythology; cataloging the many parallels and references would be redundant. It will be quicker to examine one in particular, Diana, the Roman Goddess, who is Luna in heaven, Diana on earth, and Hecate in hell.</br>

It was Luna who presided over Stephen’s night of heroism during the war, endowing him with special powers of insight and observation and leaving him with minute and vivid memories. One of Stephen’s victims “whimpered 'Mutter,’ one yelp from the first memory of the womb, and down he went into his own blood.” The association of death, mother, and the power of the moon is thus engraved on Stephen’s consciousness, which is why, when suicide beckons to him, it is the silent voice of the moon he hears. When he visits Deborah for the last time after pulling back from the seductions of Luna, it seems to him not at all exceptional ... that Deborah had been in touch with the moon and now had the word.”</br>

Of the other two representations of Diana, Hecate, the goddess of the streets and toads, is also the patroness of enchantments. Stephen’s example of Deborah’s power to lay a curse relates her to Hecate:</br>

Once after a fight with her, I had been given traffic tickets three times in fifteen minutes, once for going down a one-way street, once for jumping a red light, and once because the policeman in the last car did not like my
eye and decided I was drunk. That had all been in the form of a warning from Deborah, I was certain of that. I could see her waiting alone in bed, waving her long fingers languidly to spark the obedient diabolisms and traffic officers at her command.</br>

It is into the street that Stephen casts Deborah's corpse, and she seems to linger there, where “there is ambush everywhere," to torment him after her death.</br>

As for Diana, she is represented as tall, her hair dark ("She was a handsome woman, Deborah, she was big. With high heels she stood at least an inch over me. She had a huge mass of black hair.”) She is the goddess of the hunt and mistress of the woods. Stephen includes in his inventory of Deborah’s superiorities her skill at hunting—she considers the only suitable hunting companion for her would be”somebody who’s divine as a hunter"—and presents it in supernatural terms:</br>

She did not see a forest like others. No, out of the cool and the damp, the scent of forest odor aromatic and soft with rot, Deborah drew a mood—she knew the spirit which created attention in the grove, she told me once she could sense that spirit watching her, and when it was replaced by something else, also watching her, well, there was an animal. And so there was.</br>

So Deborah is a bitch and a goddess, and she's daddy's girl, and to all this Stephen is simply not equal. The opportunity she once held out to him has curdled into spite and scorn, and her witching powers represent, to a man who has steeped himself in death and dread, a most intimate threat. When she threatens him with divorce, which would leave his spirit in its torment without fulfilling his ambitions, he murders her. The killing itself is half-tantrum and half-orgasm and when it‘s done Stephen, exhilarated, equips himself for the struggle with the police and the media that will follow the death of an heiress by "giving the maid a bang."</br>

The maid has her spirits, too. She communicates to him sexually some of her qualities: "a host of the Devil’s best gifts were coming to me, mendacity, guile, a fine-edged cupidity for the stroke which steals, the wit to trick authority.” Afterward he is capable of viewing Deborah’s corpse and feeling a mean rage more spiteful and controlled than the madness that had seized him before.</br>

She had spit on the future, my Deborah, she had spoiled my chance ... I had an impulse to go up to her and kick her ribs, grind my heel on her nose, drive the point of my shoe into her temple and kill her again, mill her good this time, kill her right. I stood there shuddering from the power of this desire, and comprehended that this was the first of the gifts I'd plucked from the alley, oh Jesus, and I sat down in a chair as if to master the new desires Ruta had sent my way.</br>

This mood and these desires stir in Stephen the energy and cunning he will need to get around the perils of the urban jungle into which he cases Deborah‘s body. And the city itself turns up a prize to lead him on and give him good heart. For it is on the street, in the grotesque traffic pileup that attends upon Deborah in the East River Drive, that Stephen encounters the nightclub singer, Cherry. With the swift logic of a dream, they fall in love and agree to marry literally overnight, end Stephen feels a new life beginning within him, “sweet and perilous and so hard to fol1ow.” Redemption seems to beckon them both. Stephen will become a husband and a father and do the work he has not yet attempted, turning Freud upside down in a twenty-volume work of existential psychology; Cherry will choose lady over tramp and be a wife and mother. The presence within them promises that and speaks to Stephen of “the meaning of love for those who had betrayed it” ; he understands the meaning and says, “I think we have to be good,’ by which I meant that we would have to be brave."</br>

How brave he will need to be becomes clear to him after he is freed from the police by some unnamed intercession that can only have been the power of his father-in-law, Bernard Oswald Kelly. However well Ruta’s gifts may have equipped him for dealing with the ponce and the press, they are, he senses, unlikely to serve him very well against Kelly, from whom he must now free himself. And Cherry is not free either, it seems, for her former lover, the Negro singer Shago Martin, returns to devil her and Stephen. Given these complications, Stephen’s resolution to be brave diffuses. As he approaches Kelly’s, he feels three impulses: to return to Cherry and protect her from Shago, to go to Harlem and "pay for it” by enduring "some evil incident," and to confront and settle with Kelly. He understands that his choice in this must involve the exercise of the greatest possible courage if he is to make good on his vow to be brave. This allows him to reject his first impulse as being compromised by a desire to be with Cherry out of anxiety: "Some air of hurricane lay over my head.... She was my sanity, simple as that —and then I remembered the vow I had made in her bed.” But he doesn’t know which of the remaining impulses he fears more, Harlem or Kelly, and so lie doesn’t decide, and lets the taxi drift past Harlem. On the elevator to Kelly’s suite, though, he seems to conclude that he was in truth more frightened of Harlem. A voice inside him urges him there, and he pleads with it that he be left alone to love Cherry "some way not altogether deranged and doomed.... Let me love her and be sensible as well.” He dismisses the voice "and something departed from me, some etched image of Cherry’s face turned to mist.”</br>

It is in this frame of mind that he begins his ordeal with Kelly. Ste- phen’s progress to this point has hem an impossibly tortuous sequence of struggles and victories. He has broken Deborah’s hold on him and kept the police, her minions, at bay. He has suffered his losses—his future on te1evision, his position at university —without panic or despair and overcome Shago to win Cherry, however provisionally, for himself. His moments with her have given him hope, however qualified, just as his time with Ruta brought him the powers he needed at the early stages of his trial. But in Bernard Oswald Kelly he faces his most formidable adversary, and it is here that the inverted Oedipal compulsion surfaces fully.</br>

For Bernard Oswald Kelly is the father figure in Stephen's dream, the mate of the dominating mother, Deborah. And what Kelly proposes, or seems to Stephen to propose, is the completion of the taboo: incest, the pact of guilt between the murder and the mate of the victim. This is the “real thing” that Kelly speaks of at the beginning of his conversation with Stephen; this is what he has in mind when he talks of becoming friends. "I have confidence," He tells Stephen. "We’re closer than you expect.”</br>

And they are close. Both are Manichaeans, believing in a God of pure spirit and a demiurge that reigns over matter. Both are upstarts, Kelly successful in using his wife's wealth and power, Stephen a failure, and both have had dealings with women who possess and cause them to possess magical powers. The dynamics of their meeting suggests the relationship between the heroes of the naturalistic novel and those of the novel of "moral earnestness” as Mailer describes it in Cannibals and Christians.</br>

Where the original heroes of naturalism had been bold, self-centered, close to tragic, and up to their nostrils in their exertions to advance their own life and force the webs of society, so the hero of moral earnestness, the hero Herzog and the hero Levin in Mahmud’s A New Life, are men who repre- sent the contrary—passive, timid, other-directed, pathetic, up to the nostrils
in anguish: the world is stronger than they are; suicide calls.</br>

Behind this confrontation is the debt of guilt for Deborah’s death, and the actual subject of discussion is the portioning out of that guilt. The discussion occurs between the father and the son who has had visited upon him the elder’s sins, a point Kelly brings up himself. He makes it clear to Stephen that he has a share in the guilt for Deborah’s death because he has had a part in making it happen. "I’m just as guilty, after all,” he say's. "I was a brute to her. She visited that brutishness back on you.”</br>

And so the meeting between the two men is an effort on Kelly’s part to seal a pact of guilt, to "bury the ghost of Deborah by gorging on her corpse.” And one of the components of the pact is the homosexual act pro- posed to Hearn by General Cummins in The Naked and the Dead. Like Hearn before him, Stephen will be unable to consent, to follow the logic of one part of his actions through. There is, though, an exchange between the two men: "Desire came off Delly to jump the murderer of his beast, and unfamiliar desire stirred in me. echo of that desire to ear with Ruts on Deborah’s corpse.” This combination of outrages—incest and cannibalism—represents an inversion of what in Freud’s analysis was the "memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions, and religion”—the ritual meal shared by the killers of the patriarch.’ Kelly’s proposition offers Stephen the opportunity to achieve in fact what lie wishes to accomplish in his great work: turning Freud on his head.</br>

Part of the reason he cannot take this chance is that Stephen can say, with Fitzgerald, that "the very rich are different from you and me.” ln a note to the relevant chapter of Totem and Taboo Freud notes that murder and incest, offenses against the sacred laws of blood relationship, are the only ones recognized as crimes by the primitive community. In pulling Stephen within the webs of the summit, Kelly frees him from the Page of the community as it is expressed in the police stations and the tabloids. Back of all this is the Marxist orientation that ”quantity changes quality," an aphorism broadcast during one of Stephen’s television shows. Kelly theologizes along the same lines:</br>

God and the devil are very attentive to people at the summit. 1 don’t know if they stir much in the average man's daily stew . . . but do you expect God or the devil left Lenin or Hitler or Churchill alone? No. They bid for favors and exact revenge... . There's nothing but magic at the top. It’s the little secret that a few of us keep to ourselves, but that, my friend, is one reason why it’s not so easy to get to the very top. Because you have to be ready to deal with the One or the Other, and Shae’s too much for the average good man on his way. Sooner or later, he decides to be mediocre, and put up with the middle.</br>

Stephen is here being initiated into the secrets of the summit, but the signs are he’d prefer to put up with the middle. His inability to “pitch and tear and squat and lick, swill and grovel” with his father-in-law is connected with his inability to take the plunge at the moon’s bidding. He is unfit for the evil heroism that has been thrust upon him as a final result of his wartime moment and its attendant glimpse beyond the pale. Confronted with the expiatory completion of the taboo circle proposed by Kelly, Stephen falters and realizes he is caught in a position he cannot redeem. "I wanted to escape from that intelligence which let me know of murders in one direction and conceive of visits to Cherry in another, I wanted to be free of magic, the tongue of the Devil, the dread of the Lord, I wanted to be some sort of rational man again, nailed tight to details, reasonable, blind to the reach of the seas.”</br>

It is this "rational man" in Stephen that has allied itself with the “1ady" in Cherry after having contracted with Ruta, the devil's thrall. After his moment with Cherry the divided nature of his commitments dawns fully upon him: "Like a petty criminal I had sold my jewels last night to the Devil, and promised them again this morning to some child's whisper. I had a literal sense of seed out on separate voyages, into the sea of Cherry's womb, into the rich extinctions of Ruta's kitchen ."</br>

Feeling this way, Stephen cannot complete the job he has begun by murdering Deborah . He is literally of two minds, and three times in the novel we see him teeter-tottering at the edge of the abyss, drawn, in different ways each time, to perfect a relationship with suicide. Each time he draws back. Realizing the possibilities of death, he is nonetheless drawn to life. In another of Mailer's formulations, he is hip and square at once, simultaneously an atheist and a mystic.</br>

In the dialogue between the atheist and the mystic, the atheist is on the side of life, rational life, undialectical life-since he conceives of death as emptiness he can, no matter how weary or despairing, wish for nothing but more life; his pride is that he does not transpose his weakness and spiritual fatigue into a romantic longing for death, for such appreciation of death is then all
too capable of being elaborated by his imagination into a universe of meaningful structure and moral orchestration.</br>

These observations from "The White Negro" supply precisely the terms of Stephen's self-division. In his wartime experience, he discovered that death is as full of possibility, is perhaps even more dangerous, and consequently more full of possibility, than life, and this discovery leads him away from the will for life, the atheist's ability to think "that death was zero, death was everybody's emptiness." This sense of things is developed further on Kelly's balcony, to the point that Stephen can feel “some part of the heavens, some long cool vault at the entrance, a sense of vast calm altogether aware of me. 'God exists,' I thought." But just
as the call to seal the pact is too much for another part of him, so too something in him, some atheist, holds him back at the brink of suicide. He buckles and rebels, so that at the end of hi~ encounter with the moor on Kelly's parapet he retreats, pleading with the mystic inside that he had "lain with madness long enough." He rushes to his atheist's salvation, Cherry, only to see her die, the fulfillment of a warning from his mystic's voice on the way to Kelly's summit.</br>

So Stephen Rojack loses the square's life by refusing the hipster's gambit, misses the sweet of fulfilled monogamy by failing to lay its corrupted Freudian ghost. It's a measure of the novel's insufficiency that the terms of its hero's defeat arise out of a subplot so clearly cooked up, so carelessly improvised, as the romance between Stephen and Cherry; but other measures have been taken, and still, others will no doubt follow. For An American Dream is the closest Mailer has come to fulfilling the great imaginative project he advertised so vividly fifteen years age. Something happened to the art of the novel in postwar America, as Joseph Heller, Mailer 's exact contemporary, might be construed as saying in the title of his second book. But so can all the rest of the returned war veterans
be construed as saying, one way and another; only: Mailer among them has expressed and embodied his imaginative plight so vividly in a
single work. Given the failure of postwar realism, this is probably as good a way as any to "create an image of our time which will und undoubtedly stand as authoritative for this generation."' But it also parodies the thematic conceptions which Mailer hoped would support a novel intended to carry on the work of Dostoevski and Tolstoy , Stendhal and Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway. And this raises the possibility that Mailer may end his career as novelist the way so many American writers before him have done, "by travestying his own style and themes," in Fiedler's words, "by mocking himself."</br>

{{Template:Aade-sm}}
==Notes==
{{notelist}}
1. Leslie Fiedler, "The Dream of the New," in David .Madden, ed., American
Dreams. American Nightmares (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, 1970) , p. 21.
2. Stanley Edgar Hi-roan, "Norm an Mailer's Yummy Rump ," in Leo Brandy . ed.,
Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice:-Hall,
1972) , p. 104.
3. Steven Marcus, "An interview with Norman Mailer," in Braudy, Norma1J
Mailer, p. 29.
4. Ibid.
5. Fiedler, in Braudy, Norman Mailer, p. 27.
6. lhab Hassan, Radical Innocence (New York: Harperr & Row. 1996) . p. 147.
7. Richard Poirier, "The Ups and Downs of Norman Mailer," in Braudy, Norman,
Mailer, p. 17 3.
8. Sigmund Freud. Totem and Taboo , in A. A. Brill. ed., The Basic writing of
Sigmund Freud (New York: Modem Library. 1938), p. 916
9. John \Y/. Aldridge, "The Energy of New Success," in Braudy. Norman Mailer,
p. 119.

User talk:Namir Riptide

2019-04-13T05:59:55Z

Waebo: peer review

== What? ==

OK, I have to ask. What are “positive money arithmatic” (do you mean arithmetic?) and “creative situation solving” (you solve situations? like escape rooms?)? Just curious. 😁 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]])
:{{reply to|Grlucas}} Building off the joke: reading, writing, and arithmatic. I say Positive money arithmatic meaning I enjoy actually having and making money and being able to cover all my bills and live. Solve Fictional situations: D&D, WW, NWoD, PF, Rifts, Fuzion, etc. XD Logic puzzles interest me, but I already have too many interests and not enough time. XD [[User:Namir Riptide|Namir Riptide]] ([[User talk:Namir Riptide|talk]]) 16:53, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
::{{reply to|Namir Riptide}} I'd like to say that clears it up... 😉 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 19:19, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

== Mailer Family Bios ==

Just so you know: many of the Mailer family have short bios in the later editions of the ''Mailer Review''. Look in the “Mailer Review” directory of the shared drive. How are those coming? Let me or {{User|Jules Carry}} know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 22:13, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

==Peer Review of Matthew Smith’s contributions to the Course==

*'''Journal:'''
I see that you have been posting in your journal, which is great the key with journal posting is to be consistent and post frequently.

*'''Discussion'''
I see you are have not commenting or contributed to the discussion page this might hurt in you in the long run. The last discussion the class performs was about the Content Gap. As long as you participants in the activities in class you can succeed.

*'''Norris church mailer:'''
There were several assignments of Norris Church Mailer and everyone needed to contribute to the overall development. Now, I know it hard to contribute to an assignment when the whole class has just edited the article at the same time, which is why communication is key. It is never too late to start getting involved with the activities.

*'''Success'''
This class has been hard for everyone, but communicate I find is the key. In your journal post, you mention that you struggle in this class a lot because of instruction and clarity but you are not alone in this subject others students are in the same situation. Because you are trained in a different field of study you bring a different perspective towards the ideas among the group. I feel your business mindset will help structure this assignment to a much variety of individuals. --[[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 05:59, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

User:Waebo/sandbox

2019-04-12T13:22:00Z

Waebo:

'''Boiling the Archetypal Pot'''</br>
Norman Mailer’s American Dream</br>
TIMOTHY EVANS</br>

IN ONE Of HIS RECENT ESSAYS, Leslie Fiedler proposes that a new technology in a New World made both necessary and possible "the manufacture, the mass production, and the mass distribution of dreams.” Some of these were "dreams disguised as goods,” but of course they also reached their public dressed as art, poor and vulgar art, by and large; ”but what,” as Fiedler asks, ”can one expect of a population descended horn the culturally dispossessed of all nations of the world?"1
An image to reflect in accelerating expectations, to judge by the' Ragged Dicks and Tattered Toms it favored during the first great age of mass literature in America. Alger’s stereotype of struggle-and-success, and others like it, resonated with the dreams his readers dreamed; and behind those dreams was a latch in worldly success as a measure of individual humanity that reached back past the puritans’ doctrine of the calling to the Faustian core of Protestant ethics itself. But by the time the crash of 1f29 imposed its reality on the nation, a tradition had emerged among serious novelists that set them in imaginative opposition to the stereotype of struggle-and-success. Those who published the decisive works of the twenties and thirties—Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Scott FitzGerald, John Stein- beck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—a1l of them took on in some significant measure the task of demythification.
They struggled and, in true American fashion, they succeeded. They succeeded so thoroughly that only the grossest hacks find rite old stereotype a challenging target anymore. But if the example of Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins arrests to rite success of the stereotype’s enemies, it also raises a question about its obvious persistence in the popular imagination. Has the dream of success become a reflex of the mass psyche, a subliminal myth that no longer needs to be established or

159

Nourished in the public imagination? Is it somehow infused soon after, birth, or even passed on genetically, along with stronger teeth anal longer limbs? '

Such conjectures seem mild when compared to the hypothesis Norman Other broaches in his own bout with the stereotype, An American Dream. Here, a witty variant of the young man on the make is thwarted in an urban gothic melodrama that verges on vaudeville: stock characters and tacky extras abound, and the style is slaphappy with significance. Like all potboilers, it was intended to exceed the expectations of its readers, and judging by the critical response it stimulated, it was almost unanimously successful. "Mailer’s novel is bad,” wrote Stanley Edgar Hyman at the time it was published, ”in that absolute fashion that makes it unlikely that he could ever have written anything good.”' Other critics held back from this extremity, but even Mailer’s defenders were forced to the conclusion that An American Dream was a parody. For it is in many ways a shoddy and cynical performance, hacked out on schedule for serial publication, littered with barbarisms, and drastically over-motivated. It is easily dismissed on technical grounds: told in the first person, the novel relies on its hero’s rhetorical mysticism for both its narrative play and its thematic overplay. Since the ironies are at his expense, he must tell us more than he can plausibly know, which embarrasses the dream without its disguise. It also undercuts the authority of Mai1er’s hypothesis at its source. This is too bad because it’s one of his gaudier conceits that the stereotype of struggle-and-success is actually an archetype in disguise.
An upside-down archetype, one must immediately add, for the center
of this novel is an inverted Oe‹lipa1 compulsion. Just as. in Freud’s scheme, the murder of the father and incest with the mother initiated a new social order based on taboos surrounding those transgressions, so here, in An American Dream.•, Mailer’s formulation requires equally actual but reversed transgressions. Defined as she is in terms of Stephen Rojack's ambitions, his wealthy wife Deborah is the mother of his promise. When he kills her, he has the feeling he has pushed open “an enormous door." “I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. “ The act of murder changes the key of his consciousness and breaks him through into an archetypa1 region of the psyche. Jung describes the "instinctive data of the dark primitive psyche” as the component material of the archetype, and it is there that there novel

160 spring 1973

moves, into ”the real, the invisible cooks of consciousness,” when Stephen strangles his wife.
This is the territory Mailer staked out for himself in his Advertisements, which ended with a "prologue to a long novel” that would dramatize the themes he’d been discussing—"murder, suicide, orgy, psychosis,” as he listed them. The novel has never appeared, but the promise was tentative in the first place ”I do not know in all simple bitterness if I can make it," he wrote and the prologue ends in the conditional. But the work he had in mind was to be a "tale of heroes and villains, murderers and suicides, orgy-masters, perverts, and passionate lovers.” lt was to be organized into a narrative so radically schizoid that in place of a hero it would stage a contest among three candidates for that role. And, if the prologue provides an accurate sample, it was to be written in a rhetoric extreme enough to engage its author’s insight that “we hover at the edge of an orgy of language, the nihilism of meaning fair upon us.” The novel's projected starting point was to be a party at the home of one of Mailer’s candidates, Marion Faye, the “master pimp" of The Deer Park. His guests are said to constitute “an artist’s assortment of those contradictory and varied categories of people who made up the obdurate materials of new sociological alloy.” His home is described as an old rambling mansion still "alive with every murderous sleep it had ever suffered;” a wind-beaten, dream-ridden place not far from where the first Puritans landed, ”a house which had the capacity to set free, one upon the other, the dank sore-rotted assassins in the dungeons of a
family’s character." And his purposes are evidently murderous, for Marion
Faye, we are told, "had come to the point in his life, as he had foreseen in terror many a time, when the 8ux of his development, the discovery of the new beauties of his self-expression, depended on murdering a man, a particular can.”
This, then, is what we can see of Mailer's program for ”discovering the psychic anatomy of our republic." Whatever it sounds like in summary, it must have seemed to Mailer a way out of the imaginative impasse which afflicted him during the composition of Barbary Shore. He wrote that book as a Marxist whose commitment was still developing but whose "conscious themes” were solidly' political. "But my unconscious was much more interested in other matters,” as Mailer once observed in an interview referring to the themes discussed in Advertisement. ”Since the gulf between these conscious and unconscious themes
SOUTHWEST REVIEW 161

L

was vast and quite resistant to any quick literary coupling," he went on, “the tension to gel a bridge across resulted in the peculiar hothouse atmosphere of Barbary Shore.. . . And of course this difficulty kept haunting me from then on in all the work I did afterward.
If this novel is what it appears to be, its hero is the image of his author, and not only as "a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation." For Stephen Rojack has seen his great expectations dissipated and has reached the conclusion that he is a failure. The illusions he has lost were founded upon a moment of wartime heroism during which, possessed by some moonlight genius, he’d been able to overreach himself. This moment flourished into a term in the House of Representatives, during which he met Deborah, but his "secret
frightened romance with the phases of the moon"’ drew him out of ¡ '
public life and into a long professional tailspin. Rojack resembles Mailer’s first hero, Robert Hearn, who was also driven "to make the
world in his own image and impose his will upon it” but was finally forced to the discovery that "he does not have the passion or the confidence or the ruthlessness it takes; his intelligence is too skeptical, his disenchantment ... too thorough.'" But he resembles more closely one of Marion Faye’s rivals for the office of hero in Mailer’s projected novel: Rojack is, in fact, the realization of Dr. Joyce, the psychoanalyst, described in the prologue as a man who had become so overextended beyond his humane means, and had so compromised his career, his profession, and his intimate honor that he was contemplating suicide." But Dr. Joyce’s thematic responsibilities have fattened over the years, for he has been fudged with Marion Faye in An American Dream with the result that Stephen Rojack can never ghost away into the lure of suicide completely, for he must also walk about in most murderous need "with a chest full of hatred and a brain jammed to burst.“ So the dualities Mailer meant to dramatize in two radically different characters must fight for dominance within the limits of one. Rojack says de finds this both exhausting and exhilarating, but he “cannot even bear to explain” how he came to resemble Shawn Sergius, the third of Mailer’s contenders for the title of hero.
Since Rojack is some distance from being ”the only creative person- ality ever to dominate television” projected in Mailer’s prologue, his talk show amounts to a harmless literary allusion. But by merging the motives
162

of Marion Faye with those of Dr. Joyce, Mailer produces a thematic muddle, for the articulated distinction of his original design has been lost. Murder was the relationship with. death which expressed, in Marion Pune, the fundamental cannibalism to which success reduced its representatives, while the terms of Manure entailed suicide in a man like Dr. Joyce. Having combined the two impulses or one character, Mailer produces a caricature of the imaginative method by which he isolated them in the first place, a method astutely formulated by Richard Poirier: "Divide the material, argue the differences, reach a kind of stalemate and call it a ‘mystery.’ ”* What happens in An American Dream is that hip and square, atheist and mystic, murderer and suicide--all the terms of Mailer’s dialectic—stew together until the differences melt away, any- thing at all becomes admissible, and an archetype comes boiling into view. By following the course of Rojack’s crisis, it will be possible to see how all this happens.
He is a failure, then, incapable of realizing the potential of his marriage to an heiress, who despises him bitterly for his defeats. He wishes he could despise her for her wealth but knows chat he cannot completely, for it had, he remarks, “become the manifest of how unconsummated and unmasculine was the core of my force. It was like being married to a woman who would not relinquish her first lover.” That Deborah had not really relinquished her first lover she reveals just before her death. She tells Stephen she no longer loves him and remembers "the
finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things.” She has never told anyone about him, and she carries her secret with her when she dies; but Stephen later discovers that she was describing her father, who seduced her when she was fifteen. So Stephen has been a surrogate husband, at whom Deborah has clawed while she remained committed to her delicious father.
If Deborah is a man-caring bitch, she is also a kind of goddess. Her relationship with Stephen brings to mind the myth of Attis and Cybele, hut Deborah is not a representation of any particular Goddess in myth or legend. She possesses many of the particular qualities of female deities in Celtic and classical mythology; cataloging the many parallels and references would be redundant. It will be quicker to examine one in particular, Diana, the Roman Goddess, who is Luna in heaven, Diana on earth, and Hecate in hell.
It was Luna who presided over Stephen’s night of heroism during

Southwestern Review

the war, endowing him with special powers of insight and observation and leaving him with minute and vivid memories. One of Stephen’s victims “whimpered 'Mutter,’ one yelp from the first memory of the womb, and down he went into his own blood.” The association of death, mother, and the power of the moon is thus engraved on Stephen’s consciousness, which is why, when suicide beckons to him, it is the silent voice of the moon he hears. When he visits Deborah for the last time after pulling back from the seductions of Luna, it seems to him not at all exceptional ... that Deborah had been in touch with the moon and now had the word.”
Of the other two representations of Diana, Hecate, the goddess of the streets and toads, is also the patroness of enchantments. Stephen’s example of Deborah’s power to lay a curse relates her to Hecate:
Once after a fight with her, I had been given traffic tickets three times in fifteen minutes, once for going down a one-way street, once for jumping a red light, and once because the policeman in the last car did not like my
eye and decided I was drunk. That had all been in the form of a warning from Deborah, I was certain of that. I could see her waiting alone in bed, waving her long fingers languidly to spark the obedient diabolisms and traffic officers at her command.
It is into the street that Stephen casts Deborah's corpse, and she seems to linger there, where “there is ambush everywhere," to torment him after her death.
As for Diana, she is represented as tall, her hair dark ("She was a handsome woman, Deborah, she was big. With high heels she stood at least an inch over me. She had a huge mass of black hair.”) She is the goddess of the hunt and mistress of the woods. Stephen includes in his inventory of Deborah’s superiorities her skill at hunting—she considers the only suitable hunting companion for her would be”somebody who’s divine as a hunter"—and presents it in supernatural terms:

She did not see a forest like others. No, out of the cool and the damp, the scent of forest odor aromatic and soft with rot, Deborah drew a mood—she knew the spirit which created attention in the grove, she told me once she could sense that spirit watching her, and when it was replaced by something else, also watching her, well, there was an animal. And so there was.
So Deborah is a bitch and a goddess, and she's daddy's girl, and to all this Stephen is simply not equal. The opportunity she once held out

164

to him has curdled into spite and scorn, and her witching powers represent, to a man who has steeped himself in death and dread, a most intimate threat. When she threatens him with divorce, which would leave his spirit in its torment without fulfilling his ambitions, he murders her. The killing itself is half-tantrum and half-orgasm and when it‘s done Stephen, exhilarated, equips himself for the struggle with the police and the media that will follow the death of an heiress by "giving the maid a bang."
The maid has her spirits, too. She communicates to him sexually some of her qualities: "a host of the Devil’s best gifts were coming to me, mendacity, guile, a fine-edged cupidity for the stroke which steals, the wit to trick authority.” Afterward he is capable of viewing Deborah’s corpse and feeling a mean rage more spiteful and controlled than the madness that had seized him before.

She had spit on the future, my Deborah, she had spoiled my chance ... I had an impulse to go up to her and kick her ribs, grind my heel on her nose, drive the point of my shoe into her temple and kill her again, mill her good this time, kill her right. I stood there shuddering from the power of this desire, and comprehended that this was the first of the gifts I'd plucked from the alley, oh Jesus, and I sat down in a chair as if to master the new desires Ruta had sent my way.

This mood and these desires stir in Stephen the energy and cunning he will need to get around the perils of the urban jungle into which he cases Deborah‘s body. And the city itself turns up a prize to lead him on and give him good heart. For it is on the street, in the grotesque traffic pileup that attends upon Deborah in the East River Drive, that Stephen encounters the nightclub singer, Cherry. With the swift logic of a dream, they fall in love and agree to marry literally overnight, end Stephen feels a new life beginning within him, “sweet and perilous and so hard to fol1ow.” Redemption seems to beckon them both. Stephen will become a husband and a father and do the work he has not yet attempted, turning Freud upside down in a twenty-volume work of existential psychology; Cherry will choose lady over tramp and be a wife and mother. The presence within them promises that and speaks to Stephen of “the meaning of love for those who had betrayed it” ; he understands the meaning and says, “I think we have to be good,’ by which I meant that we would have to be brave."
Southwest Review 165

How brave he will need to be becomes clear to him after he is freed from the police by some unnamed intercession that can only have been the power of his father-in-law, Bernard Oswald Kelly. However well Ruta’s gifts may have equipped him for dealing with the ponce and the press, they are, he senses, unlikely to serve him very well against Kelly, from whom he must now free himself. And Cherry is not free either, it seems, for her former lover, the Negro singer Shago Martin, returns to devil her and Stephen. Given these complications, Stephen’s resolution to be brave diffuses. As he approaches Kelly’s, he feels three impulses: to return to Cherry and protect her from Shago, to go to Harlem and "pay for it” by enduring "some evil incident," and to confront and settle with Kelly. He understands that his choice in this must involve the exercise of the greatest possible courage if he is to make good on his vow to be brave. This allows him to reject his first impulse as being compromised by a desire to be with Cherry out of anxiety: "Some air of hurricane lay over my head.... She was my sanity, simple as that —and then I remembered the vow I had made in her bed.” But he doesn’t know which of the remaining impulses he fears more, Harlem or Kelly, and so lie doesn’t decide, and lets the taxi drift past Harlem. On the elevator to Kelly’s suite, though, he seems to conclude that he was in truth more frightened of Harlem. A voice inside him urges him there, and he pleads with it that he be left alone to love Cherry "some way not altogether deranged and doomed.... Let me love her and be sensible as well.” He dismisses the voice "and something departed from me, some etched image of Cherry’s face turned to mist.”
It is in this frame of mind that he begins his ordeal with Kelly. Ste- phen’s progress to this point has hem an impossibly tortuous sequence of struggles and victories. He has broken Deborah’s hold on him and kept the police, her minions, at bay. He has suffered his losses—his future on te1evision, his position at university —without panic or despair and overcome Shago to win Cherry, however provisionally, for himself. His moments with her have given him hope, however qualified, just as his time with Ruta brought him the powers he needed at the early stages of his trial. But in Bernard Oswald Kelly he faces his most formidable adversary, and it is here that the inverted Oedipal compulsion surfaces fully.
For Bernard Oswald Kelly is the father figure in Stephen's dream.
the mate of the dominating mother, Deborah. And what Kelly proposes,

166 SPRING 1975

or seems to Stephen to propose, is the completion of the taboo: incest, the pact of guilt between the murder and the mate of the victim. This is the “real thing” that Kelly speaks of at the beginning of his conversation with Stephen; this is what he has in mind when he talks of becoming friends. "I have confidence," He tells Stephen. "We’re closer than you expect.”
And they are close. Both are Manichaeans, believing in a God of pure spirit and a demiurge that reigns over matter. Both are upstarts, Kelly successful in using his wife's wealth and power, Stephen a failure, and both have had dealings with women who possess and cause them to possess magical powers. The dynamics of their meeting suggests the rela- tionship between the heroes of the naturalistic novel and those of the novel of "moral earnestness” as Mailer describes it in Cannibals at C/4ñi/idnf:

Where the original heroes of naturalism had been bold, self-centered, close to tragic, and up to their nostrils in their exertions to advance their own life and force the webs of society, so the hero of moral earnestness, the hero Herzog and the hero Levin in Mahmud’s A New Life, are men who repre- sent the contrary—passive, timid, other-directed, pathetic, up to the nostrils
in anguish: the world is stronger than they are; suicide calls. ,

Behind this confrontation is the debt of guilt for Deborah’s death, and the actual subject of discussion is the portioning out of that guilt. The discussion occurs between the father and the son who has had visited upon him the elder’s sins, a point Kelly brings up himself. He makes it clear to Stephen that he has a share in the guilt for Deborah’s death because he has had a part in making it happen. "I’m just as guilty, after all,” he say's. "I was a brute to her. She visited that brutishness back on you.”
And so the meeting between the two men is an effort on Kelly’s part to seal a pact of guilt, to "bury the ghost of Deborah by gorging on her corpse.” And one of the components of the pact is the homosexual act pro- posed to Hearn by General Cummins in The Naked and the Dead. Like Hearn before him, Stephen will be unable to consent, to follow the logic of one part of his actions through. There is, though, an exchange between the two men: "Desire came off Delly to jump the murderer of his beast, and unfamiliar desire stirred in me. echo of that desire to ear with Ruts on Deborah’s corpse.” This combination of outrages—incest and cannibalism

167

—represents an inversion of what in Freud’s analysis was the "memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions, and religion”—the ritual meal shared by the killers of the patriarch.’ Kelly’s proposition offers Stephen the opportunity to achieve in fact what lie wishes to accomplish in his great work: turning Freud on his head.
Part of the reason he cannot take this chance is that Stephen can say, with Fitzgerald, that "the very rich are different from you and me.” ln a note to the relevant chapter of Totem and Taboo Freud notes that murder and incest, offenses against the sacred laws of blood relationship, are the only ones recognized as crimes by the primitive community. In pulling Stephen within the webs of the summit, Kelly frees him from the Page of the community as it is expressed in the police stations and the tabloids. Back of all this is the Marxist orientation that ”quantity changes quality," an aphorism broadcast during one of Stephen’s television shows. Kelly theologizes along the same lines:
God and the devil are very attentive to people at the summit. 1 don’t know if they stir much in the average man's daily stew . . . but do you expect God or the devil left Lenin or Hitler or Churchill alone? No. They bid for favors and exact revenge... . There's nothing but magic at the top. It’s the little secret that a few of us keep to ourselves, but that, my friend, is one reason why it’s not so easy to get to the very top. Because you have to be ready to deal with the One or the Other, and Shae’s too much for the average good man on his way. Sooner or later, he decides to be mediocre, and put up with the middle
Stephen is here being initiated into the secrets of the summit, but the ' signs are he’d prefer to put up with the middle. His inability to “pitch
and tear and squat and lick, swill and grovel” with his father-in-law is connected with his inability to take the plunge at the moon’s bidding. He is unfit for the evil heroism that has been thrust upon him as a final result of his wartime moment and its attendant glimpse beyond the pale. Confronted with the expiatory completion of the taboo circle proposed by Kelly, Stephen falters and realizes he is caught in a position he cannot redeem. "I wanted to escape from that intelligence which let me know of murders in one direction and conceive of visits to Cherry in another, I wanted to be free of magic, the tongue of the Devil, the dread of the Lord, I wanted to be some sort of rational man again, nailed tight to details, reasonable, blind to the reach of the seas.”

168 SPRING 1975

It is this "rational man" in Stephen that has allied itself with the
“1ady" in Cherry after having contracted with Ruta, the devil's thrall.
.After his moment with Cherry the divided nature of his commitments
dawns fully upon him: "Like a petty criminal I had sold my jewels last
night to the Devil, and promised them again this morning to some child's
whisper. I had a literal sense of seed out on separate voyages, into the sea
of Cherry's womb, into the rich extinctions of Ruta's kitchen ."
Feeling this way, Stephen cannot complete the job he has begun by
murdering Deborah . He is literally of two minds, and three times in the
novel we see him teeter-tottering at the edge of the abyss, drawn, in different
ways each time, to perfect a relationship with suicide. Each time he
draws back. Realizing the possibilities of death, he is nonetheless drawn
to life. In another of Mailer's formulations, he is hip and square at once,
simultaneously an atheist and a mystic.
In the dialogue between the atheist and the mystic, the atheist is on the side
of life, rational life, undialectical life-since he conceives of death as emptiness
he can, no matter how weary or despairing, wish for nothing but more
life; his pride is that he does not transpose his weakness and spiritual fatigue
into a romantic longing for death, for such appreciation of death is then all
too capable of being elaborated by his imagination into a universe of meaningful
structure and moral orchestration.

These observations from "The White Negro" supply precisely the
terms of Stephen's self-division. In his wartime experience, he discovered
that death is as full of possibility, is perhaps even more dangerous, and
consequently more full of possibility, than life, and this discovery leads
him away from the will for life, the atheist's ability to think "that death
was zero, death was everybody's emptiness." This sense of things is dev-
loped further on Kelly's balcony, to the point that Stephen can feel
“some part of the heavens, some long cool vault at the entrance, a sense
of vast calm altogether aware of me. 'God exists,' I thought." But just
as the call to seal the pact is too much for another part of him, so too
something in him, some atheist, holds him back at the brink of suicide.
He buckles and rebels, so that at the end of hi~ encounter with the moor1
on Kelly's parapet he retreats, pleading with the mystic inside that he had
"lain with madness long enough." He rushes to his atheist's salvation,
Cherry, only to see her die, the fulfillment of a warning from his mystic's
voice on the way to Kelly's summit .

SOUTH WEST Review 169

So Stephen Rojack loses the square's life by refusing the hipster's
gambit, misses the sweet of fulfilled monogamy by failing to lay its
corrupted Freudian ghost. It's a measure of the novel's insufficiency that
the terms of its hero's defeat arise out of a subplot so clearly cooked up,
so carelessly improvised, as the romance between Stephen and Cherry;
but other measures have been taken, and still, others will no doubt follow.
For An American Dream is the closest Mailer has come to fulfilling
the great imaginative project he advertised so vividly fifteen years age.
Something happened to the art of the novel in postwar America, as Joseph
Heller, Mailer 's exact contemporary, might be construed as saying in the
title of his second book. But so can all the rest of the returned war veterans
be construed as saying, one way and another; only: Mailer among
them has expressed and embodied his imaginative plight so vividly in a
single work. Given the failure of postwar realism, this is probably as
good a way as any to "create an image of our time which will und undoubtedly
stand as authoritative for this generation."' But it also parodies the thematic
conceptions which Mailer hoped would support a novel intended
to carry on the work of Dostoevski and Tolstoy , Stendhal and Proust,
Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway. And this raises the possibility that
Mailer may end his career as novelist the way so many American writers
before him have done, "by travestying his own style and themes," in Fiedler's
words, "by mocking himself."
NOTES
1. Leslie Fiedler, "The Dream of the New," in David .Madden, ed., American
Dreams. American Nightmares (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, 1970) , p. 21.
2. Stanley Edgar Hi-roan, "Norm an Mailer's Yummy Rump ," in Leo Brandy . ed.,
Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice:-Hall,
1972) , p. 104.
3. Steven Marcus, "An interview with Norman Mailer," in Braudy, Norma1J
Mailer, p. 29.
4. Ibid.
5. Fiedler, in Braudy, Norman Mailer, p. 27.
6. lhab Hassan, Radical Innocence (New York: Harperr & Row. 1996) . p. 147.
7. Richard Poirier, "The Ups and Downs of Norman Mailer," in Braudy, Norman,
Mailer, p. 17 3.
8. Sigmund Freud. Totem and Taboo , in A. A. Brill. ed., The Basic writing of
Sigmund Freud (New York: Modem Library. 1938), p. 916
9. John \Y/. Aldridge, "The Energy of New Success," in Braudy. Norman Mailer,
p. 119.
170 SPRING 1975

Diana Athill, July 5, 1964

2019-04-12T01:35:05Z

Waebo: July, 5 Diana Athill

{{NMletter}}

{{Letterhead start|styles = margin: 2em 2em 2em 2em}}

::::::::::::::::::::597 Commercial Street<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Provincetown, Massachusetts<br />
::::::::::::::::::::July 5, 1964

Dear Diana,
<ref>
Mailer complains here of the way the British edition of his novel is described in the Deutsch catalogue of forthcoming books</ref>

::: On the negative side, I have only a few comments for the catalogue page. I think “evil wife” oversimplifies too much. I think “tragic, tormented, half-evil wife” or something of that ilk might be more satisfactory. Also, “sane love” with Cherry sounds hygienic. “To find some part of his dream of love” might be more what we need. Outside of that, I think it’s fine. But I also think we’re giving away much too much by saying that An American Dream is so unlike “mannerly British fictions,” for it seems to me that the virtuoso aspect of An American Dream is that it is so mannered a book. Violent people always are mannerly, or chaos would result if there were not a spectrum of manners in their dealings with each other. Now this has always fascinated the British—[Dashiell] Hammett, [Raymond] Chandler, so forth. But of course the manners they showed there were essentially false ones. The reality is curious and somehow subtler, and I was trying to get toward that reality in ''An American Dream''. But I think it would be a serious mistake to abdicate from any claims this novel can make in the dominion of manners, because it is precisely by the play of manners that I’ve tried to tell the story. One could even go so far perhaps as to argue that the novel is a study of the bizarre, incisive, and very elaborate manners of some of the kinds of people who live in the social worlds and under-worlds of New York. So I think we might emphasize the book is in its way as mannered as a novel by Henry James. What creates the—it is to be hoped—fascinating confusion is that the material is closer to a Mickey Spillane.
::: By the way, Diana, how do you all feel about the end of the book? There’s been not a word about that from Andre [Deutsch] or from you. If you’re unhappy, now’s the time to talk, because I hope to put in about five to ten thousand words and take out a little of the old, all of this to be accomplished by September 1. Since I’m also going to do the Republican Convention, there’ll be only a few weeks for this, probably from August 10 to September 1. But in the month between, there would certainly be time to get your comments. Please believe me, I’m not so delicate as to be afraid of negative comments. And this can go right down to the individual sentences. It’s really a good idea to let me know now whatever bothers you and Andre. Of course, if the end is a vast disappointment to you … But then I hope not. I was so tired by the time I finished I was willing to accept any external verdict that it was very good or very bad. The good remarks I heard were that it was very good, but then it was the agent and publisher who said that, and they’re not exactly similar to the critics in their interest. At any rate, give us a reaction.

</br>
::::::::::::::::::::Best for now,
::::::::::::::::::::Norman<br />

{{Letterhead end}}

{{Aade-sm}}
===Notes===
{{reflist}}

{{Aad-letters}}

User:Waebo

2019-04-11T00:09:05Z

Waebo: Minor changes

User:Waebo

2019-04-11T00:07:10Z

Waebo: Minor changes

User:Waebo

2019-04-11T00:06:43Z

Waebo:

User:Waebo

2019-04-11T00:04:07Z

Waebo: Minor changes

Talk:Norris Church Mailer

2019-04-07T23:34:20Z

Waebo:

{{reply to|Dillbug|Dmcgonagill|JVbird|JenniferMGA|Mango Masala|Namir Riptide|Sherita Sims-Jones|Waebo}} OK, our job here is to write a concise 200-word bio of NCM. Since we're all experts, this should be pretty straightforward. All references in the shared drive should be used, which might present a bit more of a challenge. This is the big writing assignment for this week, and I see no one has begun, so consider this the 🔥. 😁 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:30, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

:{{reply to|Grlucas}} Thanks for the fire! It's on my to-do list for today, after I finish my last set of papers. only 12 more to go. Then a 200 word bio. [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 17:36, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
::{{reply to|Grlucas}} I worked on the assignment some yesterday and will work on again tomorrow. So much to do, so little time!--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 01:14, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
:{{reply to|Grlucas}} Thanks for the update. I have been working on the 12 letters for the project mailer, but I do have some information to add for the bio. [[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 01:53, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
::{{reply to|Grlucas}} {{reply to|JVbird}} {{reply to|Waebo}} Okay, I think I have gotten the bio down to 200 words or less. Please check it out and tell me your thoughts. If we could all work on adding all the citations into the bio and any links you think we need we can get this task completed and not catch the wrath of Grlucas!--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 02:57, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
:::{{reply to|Grlucas}} {{reply to|JVbird}} {{reply to|Waebo}} {{reply to|Dillbug}} {{reply to|Dmcgonagill}} {{reply to|JenniferMGA}} {{reply to|Namir Riptide}} {{reply to|Sherita Sims-Jones}}Looking good, everyone! I've made some edits and added italics. I think we're about 28 words too long; I'm going to look through the NCM articles in the Google Drive to ensure we've used everything and will also work on the citations.[[User:Mango Masala|Mango Masala]] ([[User talk:Mango Masala|talk]]) 18:57, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

:::: {{reply to|Mango Masala}} I'll also go in one more time and see if I can cut some as well, Mariam. The citations are definitely missing. I'll help with that right away as well. [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 19:02, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

::::: {{reply to|Waebo}} {{reply to|Dillbug}} {{reply to|Dmcgonagill}} {{reply to|JenniferMGA}} {{reply to|Namir Riptide}} {{reply to|Sherita Sims-Jones}} Also, the Tulsa World source has a bit of a different take on a couple of things. The Executioner's Song was a TV movie, whereas the bio may be slightly off if we call it a movie? I'm also rethinking my description of the memoir as chronicling their marriage. That may be too specific. It's not just about their marriage, right? We may have to adjust the description of Art to paintings in her one-woman shows. What do you all think? Might need to just double check facts here a bit... [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 19:47, April 6 2019 (UTC)
::::: {{reply to|Dillbug|JVbird|JenniferMGA|Mango Masala|Namir Riptide|Sherita Sims-Jones|Waebo}} Just got done with ALL DAY baseball & yardwork, here to join the party! ([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 23:10, 6 April 2019 (UTC))

:::::{{reply to|Dmcgonagill}} sounds like a fun day, Dana. Maybe you can help me with what is up with my wiki links. When I do the brackets for words like Norman Mailer, they do not create an auto link where you hover over the word and get a thumbnail to a Wiki page. I remember something Lucas told me, that I need to put a w inside the bracket, as in [[w Norman Mailer]] to do that in Wikipedia, but I think I have the code wrong there. I'm going to look for the code again, then wikify it by giving links to Wilhelmina modeling agency, the school, the city, and those movies and tv shows, along with NM himself. Should anything else be wikified? [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 23:19, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

:::::: {{reply to|Dmcgonagill}} The code is this, right: [[w:Norman Mailer|Norman Mailer]] Right? [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 23:35, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
:::::::{{reply to| JVbird| Dmcgonagill}} Mailer has his own page here, so any links to him should just be <code><nowiki>[[Norman Mailer]]</nowiki></code>. If you're just linking his last name, you can use this code, too: <code><nowiki>{{NM}}</nowiki></code>. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:40, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

::::::::{{reply to| Grlucas|Dmcgonagill}} Thanks, Dr. Lucas! [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 15:29, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

:::::::{{reply to|Dmcgongill}{{reply to|JVbird}} When you put the 'w:' inside the bracket, make sure you use the double colons as well.--[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 23:46, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
::::::{{reply to|JVbird}} I just wrote you a real long response and must have forget to save!!! Ok, you use <nowiki>[[w:<wikipedia title>|<desired text output to page>]]</nowiki> for wiki links outside of our project mailer & <nowiki>[[<project mailer heading>|<desired text output to page>]]</nowiki> for wiki links inside of our project mailer...is that clear?([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 23:54, 6 April 2019 (UTC))
::::::{{reply to|Dmcgonagill}} Roger that! Merci. Now to get those dang references going. [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 23:59, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
:::::::{{reply to|Dmcgonagill}} {{reply to|JVbird}} We are citing the works found in the shared Google Drive under the Works Cited section, correct? I'm attempting to cite the official fellowship document...do you think I should cite it as a press release? thanks! [[User:Mango Masala|Mango Masala]] ([[User talk:Mango Masala|talk]]) 00:29, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

::::::::{{reply to|Mango Masala|Dmcgonagill}} That's my understanding, that all the sources in shared Google Drive should be listed there, as well as the additional source that, I believe, Rian located for the information on the Creative Writing fellowship. Then the in text citations have to be inserted as well. I tried, actually, to just pull them over from the original NCM page we worked on, but that did not work at all. Trying again [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 24:38, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
::::::::{{reply to|Mango Masala|JVbird}} I made citations for every document except that one that yes I think is a press release. Somebody please check my work though, I am a novice but here is a link that helps with the formation [[w:Template:Cite press release|The table on the right links you to all of the most common ones anyway]]([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 00:58, 7 April 2019 (UTC))
:::::::::{{reply to|Dmcgonagill|JVbird}} Thank you both for the clarification. I'm just seeing your works cited Dana and will check, too. I did try the press release template, but it did not look correct, so I deleted and will try again. [[User:Mango Masala|Mango Masala]] ([[User talk:Mango Masala|talk]]) 01:02, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
:::::::::{{reply to |JVbird|Mango Masala}} I just added some headings too. All feel free to alter, I was just throwing something out there because that seems to be the way with biography pages. I'm out for today. I'll check back in the morning! Happy editing, as wikiedu likes to end with! [[File:718smiley.svg|20px]] ([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 01:11, 7 April 2019 (UTC))
::::::::::{{reply to |Dmcgonagill}} Thanks for headings - it's taking shape. I think I've added the press release properly...will look again with fresh eyes tomorrow morn. [[User:Mango Masala|Mango Masala]] ([[User talk:Mango Masala|talk]]) 02:18, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
{{reply to|JVbird|Mango Masala}} I added a citation for each detail except '''She was the mother of two children and stepmother of Norman Mailer's five children.''' Can either of you find which source could support that and add a citation? It is interesting combing closer through the support documents that a couple of them give opposing facts to support opposing ideas about the Norman Norris marriage and relationship. Future contributors, could surely add supporting evidence on that. Anyhow, I'm done contributing to this. For a first legit group effort, I think this looks pretty good. Thanks y'all.([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 15:14, 7 April 2019 (UTC))
::::::::::{{reply to |Dmcgonagill|Mango Masala}} I sure will, Dana. I even thought of taking that out entirely, the reference to children, but it seemed to me a salient fact, although whether it belongs where I placed it, I am not ultimately sure. ([[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 15:26, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
::::::::::{{reply to |Dmcgonagill|JVbird}} Well done and thank you, guys! I will look for sources and add citation if found. Josef, I also thought about omitting info about children...I suppose whether we find citations or not will determine its fate.[[User:Mango Masala|Mango Masala]] ([[User talk:Mango Masala|talk]]) 15:41, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

:::::::::::{{reply to |Mango Masala|Dmcgonagill}} I found the source, Berger, added that citation, and then adjusted a couple of the words in the headers. That last one seemed more appropriate for the word Legacy, Death and Legacy...See what you think. [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 15:49, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
::::::::::::{{reply to| JVbird|}} Smashing, Josef! I like Legacy and Death, thanks. And, thank you {{reply to|Dillbug}} for trimming. I also see the red source indicating a non-existent page...I'm not certain what to look for in the code...did you use a template? [[User:Mango Masala|Mango Masala]] ([[User talk:Mango Masala|talk]]) 20:22, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

::::::::::::::{{reply to|Mango Masala|Grlucas}} Let's ask Dr. Lucas, then, since we're all stumped. Any suggestions for correcting the problem we are seeing with the non existent page for this source on the NCM bio: Bragg, M. A. (November 23, 2010). "Provincetown Arts 'hero' Mailer is missed". Newsgroup: CapeCodOnline.com. Retrieved 2010-11-26. Thanks! [[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 20:38, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

{{reply to|Dillbug|Dmcgonagill|JVbird|JenniferMGA|Mango Masala|Namir Riptide|Sherita Sims-Jones|Waebo}} I reduced the total to exactly 200 words without taking anything relevant out. Please everyone review and let me know if you agree. Note to Joseph: I like Death and Legacy very much! --[[User:Dillbug|Dillbug]] ([[User talk:Dillbug|talk]]) 17:27, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

:{{reply to|Dillbug|Dmcgonagill|JenniferMGA|Mango Masala|Namir Riptide|Sherita Sims-Jones|Waebo}} Looks great, Sandy! Any idea what is up with that one red source in the References list? When I hover over it, I get a note that the source does not exist. I'll check to see if I can figure out the citation but I'm the last one to be able to "see" errors in the codes UGH --[[User:JVbird|JVbird]] ([[User talk:JVbird|talk]]) 17:31, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

:{{reply to |JVbird}} That red is due to the website being out of service I believe, but I don't know what else to do because that was the link provided by the source.([[User:Dmcgonagill|Dmcgonagill]] ([[User talk:Dmcgonagill|talk]]) 22:04, 7 April 2019 (UTC))

::{{reply to|Dillbug|Dmcgonagill|JVbird|JenniferMGA|Mango Masala|Namir Riptide|Waebo}} Fabulous job. This bio if very specific, concise, and to the point. Please let me know if I need to do or add anything else. -[[User:ssimsjones|ssimsjones]] ([[User talk:ssimsjones|talk]]) 16:11, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
::{{reply to|Dillbug|Dmcgonagill|JVbird|JenniferMGA|Mango Masala |Namir Riptide}} This Bio is looking really good. Is there anything else we could add or something that someone needs help with?[[User:Waebo|Waebo]] ([[User talk:Waebo|talk]]) 23:34, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Talk:Norris Church Mailer

2019-04-07T23:27:20Z

Waebo:

Alan Earney, March 23, 1965

2019-04-07T19:49:33Z

Waebo: Alan Earney

{{NMletter}}

{{Letterhead start|styles = margin: 2em 2em 2em 2em}}

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York<br />
::::::::::::::::::::March 23, 1965

Dear Alan,<ref> The New York Times review Mailer refers to was that of Conrad Knickerbocker, appearing on 14 March 1965. Three of the most positive reviews were by Joan Didion (1934-) in National Review on 20 April 1965, by John W. Aldridge in Life on 19 March 1965, and by Leo Bersani in the Partisan Review, fall 1965. The reviews of the novel did split fairly evenly in the major periodicals, but those in smaller publications across the country were three or four to one, negative to positive. </ref>

:Let me just send you a copy directly of An American Dream, you’re certainly welcome to it, and I’ll call Grace Bechtold and ask her to hold off on buying one for you.
::As for the rest, the reviews have gone oddly on the book. About half have been poor, the other half quite good, but the poles are extreme, everything from “the most important novel written since the war” to “the worst literary hoax of the century.” But indeed, as you can guess, I did like the Times Review

::::::::::::::::::::Best for now,<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Norman
{{Letterhead end}}

{{Aade-sm}}
===Notes===
{{reflist}}

{{Aad-letters}}

Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969

2019-04-07T19:42:04Z

Waebo: Minor changes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Norman Mailer’s Letters on ''An American Dream'', 1963–1969}}
{{Aad-tabs}}
{{aade-sm}}

{{byline|type=Edited|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael}}
{{shortcut|AAD:Letters}}
''Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press, 2004''. ([[04.7]])

===From the Introduction===
Until he wrote ''[[An American Dream]]'', his most evocative and lyrical novel, [[Norman Mailer]] did not invest his major fictional characters with his deepest concerns and beliefs: a desire to grow at all costs, a distrust of pure reason, a willingness to take risks, trust in the authority of the senses, faith in courage as the cardinal virtue, fear and loathing for the incipient totalitarianism of American life and, most importantly, a belief in an heroic but limited God locked in struggle with a powerful, wily Devil, conceivably with the fate of the universe in the balance. Stephen Richards Rojack, the novel’s protagonist, has these concerns and shares Mailer’s theological beliefs. Rojack is a war hero, former congressman, college professor, talk show host, celebrity intellectual and nascent alcoholic. Preternaturally alert to omens and portents and susceptible to every premonition, he hears voices, studies the phases of the moon, and waits for either cancer or madness to strike him. His wife Deborah taunts him with her infidelities and attacks his manhood in a variety of insidious ways, driving him to a physical attack that ends with her murder. Rojack then throws her body out of the apartment window ten stories down to the pavement on the east side of Manhattan. He claims that her fall was suicide, and the brunt of the story is devoted to his attempts to convince his and her friends, the police and Deborah's father, Barney Oswald Kelly, the “solicitor for the devil,” of his innocence. Narrated in an edgy, rococo style by Rojack, the novel shows Mailer at the height of his word power as he delineates the dread-filled inner life of his embattled hero. The air of the novel is haunted, swarming with demonic and divine presences, especially in the final chapter, when Rojack confronts Kelly in his penthouse apartment in the Waldorf Towers.

<div style="clear:both;"></div>
<div style="margin:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; padding:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; text-align:right;">[[Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969/Introduction|Continue Reading »]]</div>

== The Letters ==
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! style="min-width: 150px;" | Date
! style="min-width: 200px;" | To
! style="min-width: 200px;" | Notes
|-
| September 18, 1963 || [[Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos, September 18, 1963|Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos]] || Sergio Gutierrez-Olivos was the Chilean ambassador to the United States, 1963–1965.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, October 15, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] || [[w:André Deutsch|Andre Deutsch]] (1918–2000) was the principal director of Andre Deutsch Limited, Mailer’s British publisher from 1959–1966.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, October 15, 1963|Alan Earney]] || Alan Earney was an editor at Transworld Publishers Limited.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Reed Whittemore, October 15, 1963|Reed Whittemore]] || [[w:Reed Whittemore|Reed Whittemore]], an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist, was the editor of ''Carleton Miscellany''.
|-
| October 16, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, October 16, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] || Eiichi Yaminishi was {{NM}}’s longtime Japanese translator.
|-
| October 21, 1963 || [[Willie Morris, October 21, 1963|Willie Morris]] || Mailer met Morris (1934-1999) in New York after Morris became editor of ''Harper’s'' in 1963.
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, November 4, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] ||
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, November 4, 1963|Alan Earney]] ||
|-
| November 5, 1963 || [[Adeline Lubell Naiman, November 5, 1963|Adeline Lubell Naiman]] || A college friend of Mailer’s sister Barbara, Lubell met Mailer in 1946.
|-
| November 9, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, November 9, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] || Mailer served in the Army with “Fig,” a teacher, novelist and native of Arkansas.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, November 26, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Edmund Skellings, November 26, 1963|Edmund Skellings]] || Skellings, then a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and an admirer of Mailer’s work, met Mailer at an ''Esquire'' symposium at the University of Iowa in December 1958.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[David Susskind, November 26, 1963|David Susskind]] || [[w:David Susskind|David Howard Susskind]] was an American producer of TV, movies, and stage plays and also a TV talk show host.
|-
| December 11, 1963 || [[Mary Jane Shoultz, December 11, 1963|Mary Jane Shoultz]] || Mary Jane and Ray Shoultz were acquaintances of Mailer’s.
|-
| December 15, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, December 15, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| December 17, 1963 || [[Mickey Knox, December 17, 1963|Mickey Knox]] || [[w:Mickey Knox|Knox]], one of Mailer’s closest friends, met Mailer in Hollywood in the summer of 1949.
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, December 20, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] ||
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Rita Halle Kleeman, December 20, 1963|Rita Halle Kleeman]] || Kleeman was a staff member at P.E.N., the international writers organization.
|-
| January 15, 1964 || [[Don Carpenter, January 15, 1964|Don Carpenter]] ||Carpenter (1931-1995) was a west coast novelist who corresponded regularly with Mailer in the 1960s.
|-
| January 16, 1964 || [[Vance Bourjaily, January 16, 1964|Vance Bourjaily]] ||The novelst Vance Bourjaily met Mailer in New York in 1951 and introduced him to several writers.
|-
| January 17, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 17, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-

| February 11, 1964 || [[Harvey Breit, February 11, 1964| Harvey Breit]] ||Mailer became friendly with Harvey Breit (1909-1968), a reporter and novelist who spent summers on Cape Cod.
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Mickey Knox, February 17, 1964|Mickey Knox]] ||Nothing came of the idea of having Orson Welles (1915-1984) play Henderson and Sonny Liston play Dahfu in a film version of Saul Bellow's ''Henderson in the Rain King'' (1959).
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Charles Schultz, February 17, 1964,|Charles Schultz]] ||Schultz was an official with the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences who invited Mailer to take part in a forum discussion.
|-
| February 19, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, February 19, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| March 16, 1964 || [[Vahan Gregory, March 16, 1964|Vahan Gregory]] ||The deadline for the sixth installment passed a week before Mailer wrote to Gregory, a literary acquaintance.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[George Lea, March 17, 1964|George Lea]] ||George Lea was writer friend.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[Martin Peretz, March 17, 1964|Martin Peretz]] || Now editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Peretz (1939-) was a professor at Harvard when Mailer met him in the early 1960s.
|-
| January 27, 1965 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 27, 1965| Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| February 25, 1965 || [[Diana Athill, April 23, 1965|DIANA ATHILL]] ||
|-
| March 22, 1965 || [[Richard Kluger, March 22, 1965|RICHARD KLUGER]] ||
|-
| March 23, 1965 || [[Diana Athill, March 23, 1965| DIANA ATHILL]] ||
|-
| March 23, 1965 || [[Alan Earney, March 23, 1965| ALAN Earney]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Jason Epstein, March 25, 1965| Jason Epstein]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Don Carpenter, March 25, 1965| Don Carpenter]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, March 25, 1965| Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| April 6, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, April 6, 1965| Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| April 20, 1965 || [[Donald Kaufmann, April 20, 1965| Donald Kaufmann]] ||
|-
| April 23, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, April 23, 1965| John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| April 23, 1965 || [[Moos Mailer, April 23, 1965|Moos Mailer]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, June 8, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John William Corrington, June 8, 1965|John William Corrington]] || Corrington wrote a favorable review of the novel in the ''Chicago Review'' (No. 18) 1965.
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Roger Shattuck, June 8, 1965|Roger Shattuck]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, June 8, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| June 12, 1965 || [[John A. Meixner, June 12, 1965|John A. Meixner]] || Meixner was a writer friend.
|-
| July 14, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, July 14, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| August 17, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, August 17, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| August 26, 1965 || [[Irving J. Weiss, August 26, 1965|Irving J. Weiss]] || A literary host at a radio station in New York, Weiss sought Mailer’s involvement in a couple of literary projects.
|-
| February 28, 1966 || [[Lionel Abel, February 28, 1966|Lionel Abel]] || Abel (1911-2001) was a drama professor and critic who wrote for ''Partisan Review'' and moved in the same leftist intellectual circles as Mailer.
|-
| March 24, 1966|| [[Mann Rubin, March 24, 1966|Mann Rubin]] ||
|-
| April 16, 1966|| [[Lonnie L. Wells, April 16, 1966|Lonnie L. Wells]] || Wells was a Mailer fan.
|-
|}

{{Aad-letters}}
[[Category:Projects]]
[[Category:Full Text Books]]

Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969

2019-04-07T19:39:20Z

Waebo: Minor changes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Norman Mailer’s Letters on ''An American Dream'', 1963–1969}}
{{Aad-tabs}}
{{aade-sm}}

{{byline|type=Edited|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael}}
{{shortcut|AAD:Letters}}
''Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press, 2004''. ([[04.7]])

===From the Introduction===
Until he wrote ''[[An American Dream]]'', his most evocative and lyrical novel, [[Norman Mailer]] did not invest his major fictional characters with his deepest concerns and beliefs: a desire to grow at all costs, a distrust of pure reason, a willingness to take risks, trust in the authority of the senses, faith in courage as the cardinal virtue, fear and loathing for the incipient totalitarianism of American life and, most importantly, a belief in an heroic but limited God locked in struggle with a powerful, wily Devil, conceivably with the fate of the universe in the balance. Stephen Richards Rojack, the novel’s protagonist, has these concerns and shares Mailer’s theological beliefs. Rojack is a war hero, former congressman, college professor, talk show host, celebrity intellectual and nascent alcoholic. Preternaturally alert to omens and portents and susceptible to every premonition, he hears voices, studies the phases of the moon, and waits for either cancer or madness to strike him. His wife Deborah taunts him with her infidelities and attacks his manhood in a variety of insidious ways, driving him to a physical attack that ends with her murder. Rojack then throws her body out of the apartment window ten stories down to the pavement on the east side of Manhattan. He claims that her fall was suicide, and the brunt of the story is devoted to his attempts to convince his and her friends, the police and Deborah's father, Barney Oswald Kelly, the “solicitor for the devil,” of his innocence. Narrated in an edgy, rococo style by Rojack, the novel shows Mailer at the height of his word power as he delineates the dread-filled inner life of his embattled hero. The air of the novel is haunted, swarming with demonic and divine presences, especially in the final chapter, when Rojack confronts Kelly in his penthouse apartment in the Waldorf Towers.

<div style="clear:both;"></div>
<div style="margin:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; padding:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; text-align:right;">[[Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969/Introduction|Continue Reading »]]</div>

== The Letters ==
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! style="min-width: 150px;" | Date
! style="min-width: 200px;" | To
! style="min-width: 200px;" | Notes
|-
| September 18, 1963 || [[Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos, September 18, 1963|Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos]] || Sergio Gutierrez-Olivos was the Chilean ambassador to the United States, 1963–1965.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, October 15, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] || [[w:André Deutsch|Andre Deutsch]] (1918–2000) was the principal director of Andre Deutsch Limited, Mailer’s British publisher from 1959–1966.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, October 15, 1963|Alan Earney]] || Alan Earney was an editor at Transworld Publishers Limited.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Reed Whittemore, October 15, 1963|Reed Whittemore]] || [[w:Reed Whittemore|Reed Whittemore]], an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist, was the editor of ''Carleton Miscellany''.
|-
| October 16, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, October 16, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] || Eiichi Yaminishi was {{NM}}’s longtime Japanese translator.
|-
| October 21, 1963 || [[Willie Morris, October 21, 1963|Willie Morris]] || Mailer met Morris (1934-1999) in New York after Morris became editor of ''Harper’s'' in 1963.
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, November 4, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] ||
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, November 4, 1963|Alan Earney]] ||
|-
| November 5, 1963 || [[Adeline Lubell Naiman, November 5, 1963|Adeline Lubell Naiman]] || A college friend of Mailer’s sister Barbara, Lubell met Mailer in 1946.
|-
| November 9, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, November 9, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] || Mailer served in the Army with “Fig,” a teacher, novelist and native of Arkansas.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, November 26, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Edmund Skellings, November 26, 1963|Edmund Skellings]] || Skellings, then a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and an admirer of Mailer’s work, met Mailer at an ''Esquire'' symposium at the University of Iowa in December 1958.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[David Susskind, November 26, 1963|David Susskind]] || [[w:David Susskind|David Howard Susskind]] was an American producer of TV, movies, and stage plays and also a TV talk show host.
|-
| December 11, 1963 || [[Mary Jane Shoultz, December 11, 1963|Mary Jane Shoultz]] || Mary Jane and Ray Shoultz were acquaintances of Mailer’s.
|-
| December 15, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, December 15, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| December 17, 1963 || [[Mickey Knox, December 17, 1963|Mickey Knox]] || [[w:Mickey Knox|Knox]], one of Mailer’s closest friends, met Mailer in Hollywood in the summer of 1949.
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, December 20, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] ||
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Rita Halle Kleeman, December 20, 1963|Rita Halle Kleeman]] || Kleeman was a staff member at P.E.N., the international writers organization.
|-
| January 15, 1964 || [[Don Carpenter, January 15, 1964|Don Carpenter]] ||Carpenter (1931-1995) was a west coast novelist who corresponded regularly with Mailer in the 1960s.
|-
| January 16, 1964 || [[Vance Bourjaily, January 16, 1964|Vance Bourjaily]] ||The novelst Vance Bourjaily met Mailer in New York in 1951 and introduced him to several writers.
|-
| January 17, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 17, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-

| February 11, 1964 || [[Harvey Breit, February 11, 1964| Harvey Breit]] ||Mailer became friendly with Harvey Breit (1909-1968), a reporter and novelist who spent summers on Cape Cod.
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Mickey Knox, February 17, 1964|Mickey Knox]] ||Nothing came of the idea of having Orson Welles (1915-1984) play Henderson and Sonny Liston play Dahfu in a film version of Saul Bellow's ''Henderson in the Rain King'' (1959).
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Charles Schultz, February 17, 1964,|Charles Schultz]] ||Schultz was an official with the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences who invited Mailer to take part in a forum discussion.
|-
| February 19, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, February 19, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| March 16, 1964 || [[Vahan Gregory, March 16, 1964|Vahan Gregory]] ||The deadline for the sixth installment passed a week before Mailer wrote to Gregory, a literary acquaintance.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[George Lea, March 17, 1964|George Lea]] ||George Lea was writer friend.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[Martin Peretz, March 17, 1964|Martin Peretz]] || Now editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Peretz (1939-) was a professor at Harvard when Mailer met him in the early 1960s.
|-
| January 27, 1965 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 27, 1965| Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| February 25, 1965 || [[Diana Athill, April 23, 1965|DIANA ATHILL]] ||
|-
| March 22, 1965 || [[Richard Kluger, March 22, 1965|RICHARD KLUGER]] ||
|-
| March 23, 1965 || [[Diana Athill, March 23, 1965| DIANA ATHILL]] ||
|-
|-March 23, 1965 || [[Alan Earney, March 23, 1965| ALAN Earney]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Jason Epstein, March 25, 1965| Jason Epstein]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Don Carpenter, March 25, 1965| Don Carpenter]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, March 25, 1965| Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| April 6, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, April 6, 1965| Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| April 20, 1965 || [[Donald Kaufmann, April 20, 1965| Donald Kaufmann]] ||
|-
| April 23, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, April 23, 1965| John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| April 23, 1965 || [[Moos Mailer, April 23, 1965|Moos Mailer]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, June 8, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John William Corrington, June 8, 1965|John William Corrington]] || Corrington wrote a favorable review of the novel in the ''Chicago Review'' (No. 18) 1965.
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Roger Shattuck, June 8, 1965|Roger Shattuck]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, June 8, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| June 12, 1965 || [[John A. Meixner, June 12, 1965|John A. Meixner]] || Meixner was a writer friend.
|-
| July 14, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, July 14, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| August 17, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, August 17, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| August 26, 1965 || [[Irving J. Weiss, August 26, 1965|Irving J. Weiss]] || A literary host at a radio station in New York, Weiss sought Mailer’s involvement in a couple of literary projects.
|-
| February 28, 1966 || [[Lionel Abel, February 28, 1966|Lionel Abel]] || Abel (1911-2001) was a drama professor and critic who wrote for ''Partisan Review'' and moved in the same leftist intellectual circles as Mailer.
|-
| March 24, 1966|| [[Mann Rubin, March 24, 1966|Mann Rubin]] ||
|-
| April 16, 1966|| [[Lonnie L. Wells, April 16, 1966|Lonnie L. Wells]] || Wells was a Mailer fan.
|-
|}

{{Aad-letters}}
[[Category:Projects]]
[[Category:Full Text Books]]

John W. Aldridge, April 23, 1965

2019-04-07T19:34:56Z

Waebo: John W. Aldrige

{{NMletter}}

{{Letterhead start|styles = margin: 2em 2em 2em 2em}}

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York<br />
::::::::::::::::::::September 18, 1963

Dear Jack,
<ref>John W. Aldridge (1922-) became friends with Mailer in 1951 shortly after Aldridge’s After the Lost Generation: A Study of Writers of Two Wars appeared earlier that year. It contains the first major appreciation of Mailer’s work; Mailer wrote an introduction to the 1985 reprint. Aldridge went on to write extensively about Mailer, including reviews of most of his books. Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-) wrote a scolding review that appeared in Partisan Review in the spring 1965 number. Richard Poirier (1925-) wrote a very warm review of the novel in Commentary, June 1965. In 1972 he published Norman Mailer, perhaps the most perceptive study of the first half of Mailer’s career. William Phillips (1907-2002) was the longtime editor of Partisan Review.</ref>

::I’ve held off sending you a batch of reviews, because there seemed no order to most of it. Just New York, dependably, whenever a review was done by someone who lived in New York, the review was bad. There is of course no vast mystery to this. The book was around in serial form for eight months and every literary mind in New York had an opportunity to test his message on every other literary mind, so the intellectual establishment was all bad. Philip Rahv bad, Elizabeth Hardwick in Partisan Review, Stanley Edgar Hyman in The New Leader, so it will go. Only Richard Poirier in Commentary will be good, and that’s not out until June. Also, grand surprise, National Review had a rave done by Joan Didion, who writes very nicely. At any rate, I’m getting together a batch of duplicates, and I’ll send them off with this letter to you. But could you send them back after you’ve glanced through them, for I think then I’ll be mailing the same set on to my daughter in Mexico. Finally, I decided to take out an ad in Partisan Review. Elizabeth Hardwick’s review was so bad that I decided to oppose it with yours. Originally I planned to use your entire review on two pages, but William Phillips decided that was impossible because of the smallness of the print. And so he cut a couple of hundred words out. I just hope he did the job well. I wasn’t here at the time, I was in Alaska, giving—what else—a lecture. And so was unable to see the copy before the deadline. He’s conscientious, however, and so it should be all right. Although I must say cutting that piece of yours is not so easy.
:::The book received such violently opposed reviews that—forgive this weighted metaphor—it was as if the intellectual crust of the nation were suffering a seismographic fault. It was not just the virulence of the bad reviews, except they weren’t good on their own terms, and usually they are. The put-down was declarative rather than analytical; the weight of the indictment seemed to be placed by most New York intellectuals on the improbability of the plot, which is of course the given. That the narrative clichés were chosen precisely because I felt they had been despised so long that a novelistic magic had returned to them seems not to have occurred to Rahv and Co. And so the tone of their reviews is puzzled, irritable, full of loud statement and bad faith. Like an uncle displeased with a nephew and profoundly worried. But I go on too long. You’ve probably seen most of these reviews yourself, and the ones I send from the smaller papers will prove amusing I hope.
:::Beverly and I went off this week to Provincetown to pick a house. We’ll be there four months I think, and if you’re in Nantucket we’ll get a chance to visit, for we know a man in Harwichport with a power boat. And so could reach you in two and a half hours door to door. Or if you have a boat, come visit us. We could pick you up in Harwichport. Nantucket after all is a place where people go to work. Provincetown is for sport. Naturally I choose Provincetown for work. At any rate, say hello to Leslie and my regards to your four-year-old. The one-year-old is now somewhat less of a prick. I attribute this to the civilizing influence of his father.

P.S. I don’t think we have a chance of a snowball in hell, but I’m asking my agent to talk to Jack Warner about having you on for a technical advisor.

::::::::::::::::::::Best and all Jack,<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Norman
{{Letterhead end}}

{{Aade-sm}}
===Notes===
{{reflist}}

{{Aad-letters}}

Donald Kaufmann, April 20, 1965

2019-04-07T19:27:06Z

Waebo: Donald Haufmann

{{NMletter}}

{{Letterhead start|styles = margin: 2em 2em 2em 2em}}

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York<br />
::::::::::::::::::::April 20, 1965

Dear Don, <ref>Kaufmann (1927-) was a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who became friendly with Mailer when he spoke at the University in April 1965. In 1969 he published one of the first major critical studies of Mailer, Norman Mailer: The Countdown (The First Twenty Years). The Christopher Lasch (1939-1994) book Mailer refers to is The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965).</ref>

:Just a line to tell you that I love you, and what a fine time we had. So good that it sets up looking forward to the next one. Incidentally, I found when I came home a book written by a man named Christopher Lasch which will be coming out in a couple of weeks, published by Knopf. I can’t remember the title, but the subject is a history of intellectual radicalism in America over the last hundred years, and a portion of the last chapter is devoted to your favorite subject for thesis. Lasch didn’t have anything to say which rang any big bells for me, and like many before him, he does his best to flatten nuances and make me sound twice as assertive as ever. But the chapter is finally harmless enough. I mention it only because you may wish to include it in your bibliography. Also keep an eye out for the April 20 issue of The National Review. To my absolute amazement, there’s a rave by Joan Didion on An American Dream. And nicely written too, by God.
::Give my best to Cheryl, tell her I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to her anymore than I did, and keep slugging, you old fuck of a rabbi.

::::::::::::::::::::Your fellow-alumnus from Heidelberg,<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Old Walk-on-Eggs Norm
{{Letterhead end}}

{{Aade-sm}}
===Notes===
{{reflist}}

{{Aad-letters}}

Diana Trilling, April 6, 1965

2019-04-07T19:23:02Z

Waebo: Diana Trilling

{{NMletter}}

{{Letterhead start|styles = margin: 2em 2em 2em 2em}}

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York<br />
::::::::::::::::::::April 6, 1965

Dear Diana,

:Just a racing note. I’m arriving in England the morning of the twentieth, and my business, much as it is, will probably be done by the 27th. So the 28th would probably be better for me than the 30th for the simple reason that I may have just two weeks in Europe and so would like to visit other places. If it’s generally the same to you, I’d appreciate it then if you’d make it the 28th or the 29th, but if there’s a particular reason for the 30th, then by all means, that’s when we’ll have it. And I’ll plan to spend the night. Incidentally, I still don’t know if Beverly will be with me then. She’s going to be in Europe for a week of the two and a half weeks I’ll be there, but just which part isn’t too certain yet. If you’re thinking about seating arrangements, I suggest that you assume she’ll be with me. If she’s not, it would perhaps be possible to get some fine lady on short notice. And if not, we’ll all weather the damage.
::Forgive the mechanical concentration of this, and the lack of newer news, but I wanted to get it off to you in a hurry.
::: Norman
P.S. If you haven’t answered Jerry Agel’s letter yet, then don’t. He puts out a monthly publisher’s newsletter which is filled with gossip, very little of it nasty or vicious, but I know for certain you would not want any answer you might give to Granville Hicks to appear there. And if you have written to him already, then drop him a line that you would not wish your letter used for publication. One thing more. Please don’t bring my name into this. Agel did a long piece on me and treated me reasonably well, and he would be hurt and probably vindictive if he knew I had warned you. But I know how much pain any remarks of yours printed in a newsletter sort of literary magazine would cause you, so I take the unnatural step of working just this much behind the man’s back.
::All for now. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to seeing you and Lionel again.
P.P.S. Tell Lionel that whether he ends up liking or not liking An American Dream, I respect him for not deciding immediately. Finally one critic has recognized that the book is not to be taken by storm and hung high or garlanded on the instant.

{{Letterhead end}}

{{Aade-sm}}
===Notes===
{{reflist}}

{{Aad-letters}}

Diana Trilling, March 25, 1965

2019-04-07T19:05:25Z

Waebo: Diana Trilling

{{NMletter}}

{{Letterhead start|styles = margin: 2em 2em 2em 2em}}

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York<br />
::::::::::::::::::::March 25, 1965

Dear Diana,<ref> Trilling (1905-1996) was a literary critic and wife of the Columbia professor and man of letters, Lionel Trilling (1905-1975). Her 1962 essay, “The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer,” which appeared in Encounter in November 1962, is perhaps the most intelligent examination of Mailer’s work through Advertisements for Myself. Mailer did meet Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) during his visit to England. William Faulkner (1897-1962) was then and now considered to be one of the greatest novelists of the century. Gilles de Rais (1404-1440) was a Marshall of France during the Hundred Years War. Accused of satanic beliefs, he confessed to torturing and killing over 100 children and was executed. E.M. Forster (1879-1970) wrote a series of novels of English social life in a crisp, ironic style. </ref>

:It’s perfect, but after all our talk about how reliable I am, I now pick up the pen (what a metaphor this has become) to tell you that we must go ahead and make plans for my appearance at Oxford even though I may never get to England at all. (That will touch you, darling, to be so genteel and fucking liberal) but you see, I’m having a disagreement at the moment with my British publisher. I don’t like the jacket, I don’t like the blurb, both of which of course they had to do themselves, and I told them I won’t come to England unless we can agree on the kind of publicity. Knowing Andre Deutsch, he will probably want me to go on a round of television and radio appearances, and since I don’t do that in New York for a book, I don’t see any reason to do it in London. So I have posed other possibilities to him, and now must wait to see if he will agree. Odds are much better than even, however, that I’ll be in England, the main reason being that I want to go. So look, let’s set a date, I leave it to you, any time after the 23rd, except perhaps publication day, which is something like the 26th or 27th —a phone call to Andre Deutsch in London (Langham 2746-9) will establish the day, and then let me know which day you’ve chosen. It will be yours.
Now what I’d like ideally is a dinner for eight at your house and then perhaps a few more people in afterward. One can’t possibly get to talk to sixteen or twenty people at dinner by any method known to man, and the Senior Common Room, while appealing to the novelist in me, and very suitable and exciting if it should come to pass, promises still less in the way of a delight than dinner for eight in the charming small house you seem to possess. Surely even at Oxford people have been known to drop in after dinner. Isn’t that remotely possible? I have only one firm request: you must get Iris Murdoch for dinner. I loved her novel, The Severed Head, and have always wanted to meet her since.
The reception of An American Dream has been—believe it if you can—more schizophrenic than anything of mine which preceded it. I’ve gotten the very best and the very worst reviews I’ve ever received. John Aldridge of all people, writing in Life, of all the places, said in effect that I was doing the most important writing in the country since [William] Faulkner. Stanley Edgar Hyman in The New Leader said it was a dreadful novel. Philip Rahv detested it, so and so loved it. As you can guess, I’ve enjoyed all this secretly very much, because no vice of mine could be greater than my desire to create a sensation and be forever talked about. Sometimes I wonder, beloved, if I am the ghost of some long-dead London beauty. Well, well, I expect the British will give me good whipping with the thinnest strings of leather for the outrages I’ve committed in the name of literature. But when you feel in the mood, you must write me what you think of the book, even if you don’t like it at all, although I suspect you might just like it, it’s an extraordinary novel in its funny fashion, extraordinary, that is, in what it does with the art of the novel, whether for good or ill. It’s as if Gilles de Rais had captured the style of E.M. Forster and was running amok with it. So far of course none of the critics have had even the remotest notion that the real debating ground of An American Dream is precisely on how it does and does not contribute to the grand art of the novel but I get them so poisonous and upset they can’t think straight, and that always tickles my devil, for there is no sight in all the world quite so funny as an intellectual who is too agitated to think. They are then like elephants without a trunk, nothing but hippopotami.
Love,
Norman

::::::::::::::::::::Love,<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Norman
{{Letterhead end}}

{{Aade-sm}}
===Notes===
{{reflist}}

{{Aad-letters}}

Don Carpenter, March 25, 1965

2019-04-07T19:01:24Z

Waebo: Don Carpenter

{{NMletter}}

{{Letterhead start|styles = margin: 2em 2em 2em 2em}}

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York<br />
::::::::::::::::::::March 25, 1965

Dear Don,<ref> Carpenter’s positive review has not been located..</ref>

I read your review with interest. First of all because it was agreeable to read, second because you said a few things I found fascinating, and third because it was interesting to see how they rearranged it and fucked it up in the newspaper. That opened a door into the world of book review editors and gave a hint of why all book reviews end up reading the same. The reviews in general have been not too bad on An American Dream, which is to say they broke about two good, three bad in the important places, and about one good, three bad in the out of town reviews. But the bad reviews were lively and the book seems to be off to a start. I find I hardly care. I’ve been in a post partum for months, not a deep one, no gloom in this, just a sense of personal flatness. For the first time in years I feel no desire to write the great American novel. It doesn’t seem important. I don’t seem important. And I’m bored with myself—that’s an emotion I haven’t felt in years. But it seems to me I spent my last letter complaining in just this fashion, and twice is enough for the best of pen pals. So let me hasten to add that I’ll have my secretary call Bob Mills so that he can send the novel on to me and you can be certain I’ll be looking forward to this. I’ll let you know as soon as I read it, but of course that may not be for several weeks, since I’m off to Alaska April 1 for a few days of action back and forth in the sparkling halls of Greater Northern America.
Best for now,
Norman

::::::::::::::::::::Best for Now,<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Norman
{{Letterhead end}}

{{Aade-sm}}
===Notes===
{{reflist}}

{{Aad-letters}}

Jason Epstein, March 25, 1965

2019-04-07T18:57:31Z

Waebo: Jason Epstein

{{NMletter}}

{{Letterhead start|styles = margin: 2em 2em 2em 2em}}

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York<br />
::::::::::::::::::::March 25, 1965

Dear Jason,<ref>Epstein (1928-) was the longtime editorial director at Random House, where he was Mailer’s editor after Mailer left Little, Brown for Random House in 1984. He is also a founder of the New York Review of Books and the Library of America. Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote a negative review of An American Dream for The New Leader, appearing on 15 March 1965.
</ref>
</br>Your letter was fine, and I’m glad you wrote it to me, for it was clear as well, and so helps to explain why many people don’t like the book. I’ll not try to answer it here except to say that Rojack is neither mad nor sane, but in that extreme state of fatigue and emotional exhaustion where the senses are crystal clear and paranoia substitutes its vertical salience for the horizontal measure of daily reason, and everything takes place somewhere between a fever and a dream. If the action is big enough, one could even feel clear-headed and purposeful in the midst of all this. I think I may have made the error of not emphasizing this condition, of even not writing a small essay about what it was like. It is, after all, not insanity but an existential state, but I may have been wrong in assuming that people would recognize it as equivalent to some kind of a crisis in their own lives. Philip [Rahv], after all, and Stanley [Edgar] Hyman, seem to give no sense at all of knowing what it is like to be on a three-day bat with something awful behind you and something fearful coming up. One thing is certain so far. This novel has not two bits worth of attraction for intellectuals, our kind of intellectuals, which leads me to suspect that it is either considerably better or considerably less good than I think it is.

::::::::::::::::::::Sincerely,<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Norman
{{Letterhead end}}

{{Aade-sm}}
===Notes===
{{reflist}}

{{Aad-letters}}

Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969

2019-04-07T18:48:35Z

Waebo: Minor changes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Norman Mailer’s Letters on ''An American Dream'', 1963–1969}}
{{Aad-tabs}}
{{aade-sm}}

{{byline|type=Edited|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael}}
{{shortcut|AAD:Letters}}
''Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press, 2004''. ([[04.7]])

===From the Introduction===
Until he wrote ''[[An American Dream]]'', his most evocative and lyrical novel, [[Norman Mailer]] did not invest his major fictional characters with his deepest concerns and beliefs: a desire to grow at all costs, a distrust of pure reason, a willingness to take risks, trust in the authority of the senses, faith in courage as the cardinal virtue, fear and loathing for the incipient totalitarianism of American life and, most importantly, a belief in an heroic but limited God locked in struggle with a powerful, wily Devil, conceivably with the fate of the universe in the balance. Stephen Richards Rojack, the novel’s protagonist, has these concerns and shares Mailer’s theological beliefs. Rojack is a war hero, former congressman, college professor, talk show host, celebrity intellectual and nascent alcoholic. Preternaturally alert to omens and portents and susceptible to every premonition, he hears voices, studies the phases of the moon, and waits for either cancer or madness to strike him. His wife Deborah taunts him with her infidelities and attacks his manhood in a variety of insidious ways, driving him to a physical attack that ends with her murder. Rojack then throws her body out of the apartment window ten stories down to the pavement on the east side of Manhattan. He claims that her fall was suicide, and the brunt of the story is devoted to his attempts to convince his and her friends, the police and Deborah's father, Barney Oswald Kelly, the “solicitor for the devil,” of his innocence. Narrated in an edgy, rococo style by Rojack, the novel shows Mailer at the height of his word power as he delineates the dread-filled inner life of his embattled hero. The air of the novel is haunted, swarming with demonic and divine presences, especially in the final chapter, when Rojack confronts Kelly in his penthouse apartment in the Waldorf Towers.

<div style="clear:both;"></div>
<div style="margin:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; padding:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; text-align:right;">[[Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969/Introduction|Continue Reading »]]</div>

== The Letters ==
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! style="min-width: 150px;" | Date
! style="min-width: 200px;" | To
! style="min-width: 200px;" | Notes
|-
| September 18, 1963 || [[Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos, September 18, 1963|Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos]] || Sergio Gutierrez-Olivos was the Chilean ambassador to the United States, 1963–1965.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, October 15, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] || [[w:André Deutsch|Andre Deutsch]] (1918–2000) was the principal director of Andre Deutsch Limited, Mailer’s British publisher from 1959–1966.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, October 15, 1963|Alan Earney]] || Alan Earney was an editor at Transworld Publishers Limited.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Reed Whittemore, October 15, 1963|Reed Whittemore]] || [[w:Reed Whittemore|Reed Whittemore]], an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist, was the editor of ''Carleton Miscellany''.
|-
| October 16, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, October 16, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] || Eiichi Yaminishi was {{NM}}’s longtime Japanese translator.
|-
| October 21, 1963 || [[Willie Morris, October 21, 1963|Willie Morris]] || Mailer met Morris (1934-1999) in New York after Morris became editor of ''Harper’s'' in 1963.
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, November 4, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] ||
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, November 4, 1963|Alan Earney]] ||
|-
| November 5, 1963 || [[Adeline Lubell Naiman, November 5, 1963|Adeline Lubell Naiman]] || A college friend of Mailer’s sister Barbara, Lubell met Mailer in 1946.
|-
| November 9, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, November 9, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] || Mailer served in the Army with “Fig,” a teacher, novelist and native of Arkansas.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, November 26, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Edmund Skellings, November 26, 1963|Edmund Skellings]] || Skellings, then a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and an admirer of Mailer’s work, met Mailer at an ''Esquire'' symposium at the University of Iowa in December 1958.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[David Susskind, November 26, 1963|David Susskind]] || [[w:David Susskind|David Howard Susskind]] was an American producer of TV, movies, and stage plays and also a TV talk show host.
|-
| December 11, 1963 || [[Mary Jane Shoultz, December 11, 1963|Mary Jane Shoultz]] || Mary Jane and Ray Shoultz were acquaintances of Mailer’s.
|-
| December 15, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, December 15, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| December 17, 1963 || [[Mickey Knox, December 17, 1963|Mickey Knox]] || [[w:Mickey Knox|Knox]], one of Mailer’s closest friends, met Mailer in Hollywood in the summer of 1949.
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, December 20, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] ||
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Rita Halle Kleeman, December 20, 1963|Rita Halle Kleeman]] || Kleeman was a staff member at P.E.N., the international writers organization.
|-
| January 15, 1964 || [[Don Carpenter, January 15, 1964|Don Carpenter]] ||Carpenter (1931-1995) was a west coast novelist who corresponded regularly with Mailer in the 1960s.
|-
| January 16, 1964 || [[Vance Bourjaily, January 16, 1964|Vance Bourjaily]] ||The novelst Vance Bourjaily met Mailer in New York in 1951 and introduced him to several writers.
|-
| January 17, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 17, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-

| February 11, 1964 || [[Harvey Breit, February 11, 1964| Harvey Breit]] ||Mailer became friendly with Harvey Breit (1909-1968), a reporter and novelist who spent summers on Cape Cod.
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Mickey Knox, February 17, 1964|Mickey Knox]] ||Nothing came of the idea of having Orson Welles (1915-1984) play Henderson and Sonny Liston play Dahfu in a film version of Saul Bellow's ''Henderson in the Rain King'' (1959).
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Charles Schultz, February 17, 1964,|Charles Schultz]] ||Schultz was an official with the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences who invited Mailer to take part in a forum discussion.
|-
| February 19, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, February 19, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| March 16, 1964 || [[Vahan Gregory, March 16, 1964|Vahan Gregory]] ||The deadline for the sixth installment passed a week before Mailer wrote to Gregory, a literary acquaintance.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[George Lea, March 17, 1964|George Lea]] ||George Lea was writer friend.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[Martin Peretz, March 17, 1964|Martin Peretz]] || Now editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Peretz (1939-) was a professor at Harvard when Mailer met him in the early 1960s.
|-
| January 27, 1965 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 27, 1965| Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| February 25, 1965 || [[Diana, April 23, 1965|DIANA ATHILL]] ||
|-
| March 22, 1965 || [[RICHARD KLUGER, March 22, 1965|RICHARD KLUGER]] ||
|-
| March 23, 1965 || [[DIANA ATHILL, March 23, 1965| DIANA ATHILL]] ||
|-
|-March 23, 1965 || [[ALAN Earney, March 23, 1965| ALAN Earney]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Jason Epstein, March 25, 1965| Jason Epstein]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Don Carpenter, March 25, 1965| Don Carpenter]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, March 25, 1965| Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| April 6, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, April 6, 1965| Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| April 20, 1965 || [[Donald Kaufmann, April 20, 1965| Donald Kaufmann]] ||
|-
| April 23, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, April 23, 1965| John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| April 23, 1965 || [[Moos Mailer, April 23, 1965|Moos Mailer]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, June 8, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John William Corrington, June 8, 1965|John William Corrington]] || Corrington wrote a favorable review of the novel in the ''Chicago Review'' (No. 18) 1965.
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Roger Shattuck, June 8, 1965|Roger Shattuck]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, June 8, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| June 12, 1965 || [[John A. Meixner, June 12, 1965|John A. Meixner]] || Meixner was a writer friend.
|-
| July 14, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, July 14, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| August 17, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, August 17, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| August 26, 1965 || [[Irving J. Weiss, August 26, 1965|Irving J. Weiss]] || A literary host at a radio station in New York, Weiss sought Mailer’s involvement in a couple of literary projects.
|-
| February 28, 1966 || [[Lionel Abel, February 28, 1966|Lionel Abel]] || Abel (1911-2001) was a drama professor and critic who wrote for ''Partisan Review'' and moved in the same leftist intellectual circles as Mailer.
|-
| March 24, 1966|| [[Mann Rubin, March 24, 1966|Mann Rubin]] ||
|-
| April 16, 1966|| [[Lonnie L. Wells, April 16, 1966|Lonnie L. Wells]] || Wells was a Mailer fan.
|-
|}

{{Aad-letters}}
[[Category:Projects]]
[[Category:Full Text Books]]

Richard Kluger, March 22, 1965

2019-04-07T18:36:32Z

Waebo: Richard Kluger

{{NMletter}}

{{Letterhead start|styles = margin: 2em 2em 2em 2em}}

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York<br />
::::::::::::::::::::March 22, 1965

Dear Dick,<ref>Kluger was an editor at the literary supplement, Book Week. Mailer was responding, in part, to his request for a list of the books that most influenced him. Tom Wolfe (1931-), novelist and new journalist, wrote a negative review of An American Dream that appeared in Book Week on 14 March 1965. Philip Rahv (1908-1973), the literary critic, wrote his negative review for the 25 March 1965 number of the New York Review of Books, then and now edited by Robert B. Silvers (1929-). Granville Hicks (1901-1982) was the literary editor of The Saturday Review, where on 20 March 1965 he gave the novel a negative review, suggesting that it was a literary hoax. Mailer called him “predictable Hicks” in a review of Norman Podhoretz’s memoir, Making It, in Partisan Review, spring 1968.</ref>

Thank you for your letter, which was a good one. There are no hard feelings. All you can ever ask of a book review editor is that he offers you a fair to good draw on the reviewer. And in advance I would have said Tom Wolfe was a fair choice. The New York Review [of Books] is the one I’m irritated at. Because [Robert B.] Silvers must have known (everyone else in New York did) that my work has been anathema to Philip Rahv for years.
Here’s the list. I’m not very happy with it, and I’m not sure you’re doing the right thing. It’s the sort of poll that tends to reinforce a literary establishment. My opinions go into the hopper with Granville Hicks’—what does that accomplish? Since there are more Hicks, he thrives on this sort of poll and ultimately I perish. Perhaps not personally, i.e., my “stock” can remain high, but my power to influence opinion has to be diminished by setting up a College of Electors of this sort.

::::::::::::::::::::Yours sincerely,<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Norman
{{Letterhead end}}

{{Aade-sm}}
===Notes===
{{reflist}}

{{Aad-letters}}

Diana Athill, February 25, 1965

2019-04-07T17:57:39Z

Waebo: DIANA Athill

{{NMletter}}

{{Letterhead start|styles = margin: 2em 2em 2em 2em}}

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights<br />
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York<br />
::::::::::::::::::::February 25, 1965

Dear Diana,<ref>
Mailer’s extreme dissatisfaction with the dust jacket of the Deutsch edition may have led to the elimination of “the gentlemen in the car wreck”(one half of the painting) from the back of the dust jacket of the British book club edition that followed the Deutsch edition.
</ref>
The jacket aroused my fury on two counts. 1) The girl on the cover doesn’t bear the remotest resemblance to Deborah, Cherry, or even Ruta. The result, so far as I am concerned, is that people will be imagining a woman who does not correspond to any of the women in the book. You know, when you spend a lot of time working on a character, trying to etch their outlines clearly, it’s not agreeable to see the work overturned by a gimmick. I really wish I’d been consulted on the jacket.
Which brings me to the second point. 2) I don’t mind not having a photograph of myself on the book, but the gentleman in the car wreck on the back of the jacket is unmistakably a dog-faced version of this particular pen. Now Diana, I need that about as much as you do. 3) (I find there’s a third objection after all) That is the value of the jacket altogether. It’s a most interesting painting, not terribly good, not altogether good, not altogether bad, but it manages to indicate symbolically just about every element of the book, which means that people are going to be picturing the book through the artist’s eyes as much as through mine, and that’s going to result in a doubling of the effect which may prove fatal. It’s one thing for me to create an atmosphere of horror, it’s another to drench the reader in a state of horror before he begins to read the book. If you’re going to dare playing an entire composition in the key of C, it’s not necessarily wise to strike thirty chords in the key of C before you begin. Now I grant you the jacket is the first of it’s kind, etc., etc., and I’m sure that everyone in the book industry will notice it, and people in the book stores will notice it (of course if they do not look closely they will think it is the jacket of a paperback book) but what the jacket will not accomplish is a deepening of respect for the qualities of the book and that I insist is the single factor which will prove fatal. To push a novel by Norman Mailer as a best seller can only draw the wrath of the critics. Get a string of bad reviews, and you’re dead. This has been my argument from the beginning. It has not been listened to and I just [think] you’re all not dead wrong, though certainly I think you are.
Now one thing I must insist on. I want the photograph which Anne Barry took of me to be the sole photograph released for publicity. It’s a picture which in my opinion fits the book more closely than any other photograph I’ve ever had taken, and for that reason I want no other.

<br>Best for now, Diana, and we’ll talk about my visit after we’ve cleared the air a little on these matters.</br>
<br>Norman</br>

{{Letterhead end}}

{{Aade-sm}}
===Notes===
{{reflist}}

{{Aad-letters}}

Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969

2019-04-07T17:40:23Z

Waebo: Minor changes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Norman Mailer’s Letters on ''An American Dream'', 1963–1969}}
{{Aad-tabs}}
{{aade-sm}}

{{byline|type=Edited|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael}}
{{shortcut|AAD:Letters}}
''Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press, 2004''. ([[04.7]])

===From the Introduction===
Until he wrote ''[[An American Dream]]'', his most evocative and lyrical novel, [[Norman Mailer]] did not invest his major fictional characters with his deepest concerns and beliefs: a desire to grow at all costs, a distrust of pure reason, a willingness to take risks, trust in the authority of the senses, faith in courage as the cardinal virtue, fear and loathing for the incipient totalitarianism of American life and, most importantly, a belief in an heroic but limited God locked in struggle with a powerful, wily Devil, conceivably with the fate of the universe in the balance. Stephen Richards Rojack, the novel’s protagonist, has these concerns and shares Mailer’s theological beliefs. Rojack is a war hero, former congressman, college professor, talk show host, celebrity intellectual and nascent alcoholic. Preternaturally alert to omens and portents and susceptible to every premonition, he hears voices, studies the phases of the moon, and waits for either cancer or madness to strike him. His wife Deborah taunts him with her infidelities and attacks his manhood in a variety of insidious ways, driving him to a physical attack that ends with her murder. Rojack then throws her body out of the apartment window ten stories down to the pavement on the east side of Manhattan. He claims that her fall was suicide, and the brunt of the story is devoted to his attempts to convince his and her friends, the police and Deborah's father, Barney Oswald Kelly, the “solicitor for the devil,” of his innocence. Narrated in an edgy, rococo style by Rojack, the novel shows Mailer at the height of his word power as he delineates the dread-filled inner life of his embattled hero. The air of the novel is haunted, swarming with demonic and divine presences, especially in the final chapter, when Rojack confronts Kelly in his penthouse apartment in the Waldorf Towers.

<div style="clear:both;"></div>
<div style="margin:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; padding:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; text-align:right;">[[Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969/Introduction|Continue Reading »]]</div>

== The Letters ==
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! style="min-width: 150px;" | Date
! style="min-width: 200px;" | To
! style="min-width: 200px;" | Notes
|-
| September 18, 1963 || [[Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos, September 18, 1963|Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos]] || Sergio Gutierrez-Olivos was the Chilean ambassador to the United States, 1963–1965.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, October 15, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] || [[w:André Deutsch|Andre Deutsch]] (1918–2000) was the principal director of Andre Deutsch Limited, Mailer’s British publisher from 1959–1966.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, October 15, 1963|Alan Earney]] || Alan Earney was an editor at Transworld Publishers Limited.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Reed Whittemore, October 15, 1963|Reed Whittemore]] || [[w:Reed Whittemore|Reed Whittemore]], an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist, was the editor of ''Carleton Miscellany''.
|-
| October 16, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, October 16, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] || Eiichi Yaminishi was {{NM}}’s longtime Japanese translator.
|-
| October 21, 1963 || [[Willie Morris, October 21, 1963|Willie Morris]] || Mailer met Morris (1934-1999) in New York after Morris became editor of ''Harper’s'' in 1963.
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, November 4, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] ||
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, November 4, 1963|Alan Earney]] ||
|-
| November 5, 1963 || [[Adeline Lubell Naiman, November 5, 1963|Adeline Lubell Naiman]] || A college friend of Mailer’s sister Barbara, Lubell met Mailer in 1946.
|-
| November 9, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, November 9, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] || Mailer served in the Army with “Fig,” a teacher, novelist and native of Arkansas.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, November 26, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Edmund Skellings, November 26, 1963|Edmund Skellings]] || Skellings, then a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and an admirer of Mailer’s work, met Mailer at an ''Esquire'' symposium at the University of Iowa in December 1958.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[David Susskind, November 26, 1963|David Susskind]] || [[w:David Susskind|David Howard Susskind]] was an American producer of TV, movies, and stage plays and also a TV talk show host.
|-
| December 11, 1963 || [[Mary Jane Shoultz, December 11, 1963|Mary Jane Shoultz]] || Mary Jane and Ray Shoultz were acquaintances of Mailer’s.
|-
| December 15, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, December 15, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| December 17, 1963 || [[Mickey Knox, December 17, 1963|Mickey Knox]] || [[w:Mickey Knox|Knox]], one of Mailer’s closest friends, met Mailer in Hollywood in the summer of 1949.
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, December 20, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] ||
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Rita Halle Kleeman, December 20, 1963|Rita Halle Kleeman]] || Kleeman was a staff member at P.E.N., the international writers organization.
|-
| January 15, 1964 || [[Don Carpenter, January 15, 1964|Don Carpenter]] ||Carpenter (1931-1995) was a west coast novelist who corresponded regularly with Mailer in the 1960s.
|-
| January 16, 1964 || [[Vance Bourjaily, January 16, 1964|Vance Bourjaily]] ||The novelst Vance Bourjaily met Mailer in New York in 1951 and introduced him to several writers.
|-
| January 17, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 17, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-

| February 11, 1964 || [[Harvey Breit, February 11, 1964| Harvey Breit]] ||Mailer became friendly with Harvey Breit (1909-1968), a reporter and novelist who spent summers on Cape Cod.
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Mickey Knox, February 17, 1964|Mickey Knox]] ||Nothing came of the idea of having Orson Welles (1915-1984) play Henderson and Sonny Liston play Dahfu in a film version of Saul Bellow's ''Henderson in the Rain King'' (1959).
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Charles Schultz, February 17, 1964,|Charles Schultz]] ||Schultz was an official with the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences who invited Mailer to take part in a forum discussion.
|-
| February 19, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, February 19, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| March 16, 1964 || [[Vahan Gregory, March 16, 1964|Vahan Gregory]] ||The deadline for the sixth installment passed a week before Mailer wrote to Gregory, a literary acquaintance.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[George Lea, March 17, 1964|George Lea]] ||George Lea was writer friend.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[Martin Peretz, March 17, 1964|Martin Peretz]] || Now editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Peretz (1939-) was a professor at Harvard when Mailer met him in the early 1960s.
|-
| January 27, 1965 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 27, 1965| Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| February 25, 1965 || [[Diana, April 23, 1965|DIANA ATHILL]] ||
|-
| March 22, 1965 || [[RICHARD KLUGER, March 22, 1965|RICHARD KLUGER]] ||
|-
| March 23, 1965 || [[DINA ATHILL, March 23, 1965| DIANA ATHILL]] ||
|-
|-March 23, 1965 || [[ALAN Earney, March 23, 1965| ALAN Earney]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Jason Epstein, March 25, 1965| Jason Epstein]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Don Carpenter, March 25, 1965| Don Carpenter]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, March 25, 1965| Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| April 6, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, April 6, 1965| Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| April 20, 1965 || [[Donald Kaufmann, April 20, 1965| Donald Kaufmann]] ||
|-
| April 23, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, April 23, 1965| John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| April 23, 1965 || [[Moos Mailer, April 23, 1965|Moos Mailer]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, June 8, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John William Corrington, June 8, 1965|John William Corrington]] || Corrington wrote a favorable review of the novel in the ''Chicago Review'' (No. 18) 1965.
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Roger Shattuck, June 8, 1965|Roger Shattuck]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, June 8, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| June 12, 1965 || [[John A. Meixner, June 12, 1965|John A. Meixner]] || Meixner was a writer friend.
|-
| July 14, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, July 14, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| August 17, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, August 17, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| August 26, 1965 || [[Irving J. Weiss, August 26, 1965|Irving J. Weiss]] || A literary host at a radio station in New York, Weiss sought Mailer’s involvement in a couple of literary projects.
|-
| February 28, 1966 || [[Lionel Abel, February 28, 1966|Lionel Abel]] || Abel (1911-2001) was a drama professor and critic who wrote for ''Partisan Review'' and moved in the same leftist intellectual circles as Mailer.
|-
| March 24, 1966|| [[Mann Rubin, March 24, 1966|Mann Rubin]] ||
|-
| April 16, 1966|| [[Lonnie L. Wells, April 16, 1966|Lonnie L. Wells]] || Wells was a Mailer fan.
|-
|}

{{Aad-letters}}
[[Category:Projects]]
[[Category:Full Text Books]]

Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969

2019-04-07T17:36:25Z

Waebo: Minor changes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Norman Mailer’s Letters on ''An American Dream'', 1963–1969}}
{{Aad-tabs}}
{{aade-sm}}

{{byline|type=Edited|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael}}
{{shortcut|AAD:Letters}}
''Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press, 2004''. ([[04.7]])

===From the Introduction===
Until he wrote ''[[An American Dream]]'', his most evocative and lyrical novel, [[Norman Mailer]] did not invest his major fictional characters with his deepest concerns and beliefs: a desire to grow at all costs, a distrust of pure reason, a willingness to take risks, trust in the authority of the senses, faith in courage as the cardinal virtue, fear and loathing for the incipient totalitarianism of American life and, most importantly, a belief in an heroic but limited God locked in struggle with a powerful, wily Devil, conceivably with the fate of the universe in the balance. Stephen Richards Rojack, the novel’s protagonist, has these concerns and shares Mailer’s theological beliefs. Rojack is a war hero, former congressman, college professor, talk show host, celebrity intellectual and nascent alcoholic. Preternaturally alert to omens and portents and susceptible to every premonition, he hears voices, studies the phases of the moon, and waits for either cancer or madness to strike him. His wife Deborah taunts him with her infidelities and attacks his manhood in a variety of insidious ways, driving him to a physical attack that ends with her murder. Rojack then throws her body out of the apartment window ten stories down to the pavement on the east side of Manhattan. He claims that her fall was suicide, and the brunt of the story is devoted to his attempts to convince his and her friends, the police and Deborah's father, Barney Oswald Kelly, the “solicitor for the devil,” of his innocence. Narrated in an edgy, rococo style by Rojack, the novel shows Mailer at the height of his word power as he delineates the dread-filled inner life of his embattled hero. The air of the novel is haunted, swarming with demonic and divine presences, especially in the final chapter, when Rojack confronts Kelly in his penthouse apartment in the Waldorf Towers.

<div style="clear:both;"></div>
<div style="margin:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; padding:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; text-align:right;">[[Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969/Introduction|Continue Reading »]]</div>

== The Letters ==
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! style="min-width: 150px;" | Date
! style="min-width: 200px;" | To
! style="min-width: 200px;" | Notes
|-
| September 18, 1963 || [[Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos, September 18, 1963|Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos]] || Sergio Gutierrez-Olivos was the Chilean ambassador to the United States, 1963–1965.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, October 15, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] || [[w:André Deutsch|Andre Deutsch]] (1918–2000) was the principal director of Andre Deutsch Limited, Mailer’s British publisher from 1959–1966.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, October 15, 1963|Alan Earney]] || Alan Earney was an editor at Transworld Publishers Limited.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Reed Whittemore, October 15, 1963|Reed Whittemore]] || [[w:Reed Whittemore|Reed Whittemore]], an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist, was the editor of ''Carleton Miscellany''.
|-
| October 16, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, October 16, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] || Eiichi Yaminishi was {{NM}}’s longtime Japanese translator.
|-
| October 21, 1963 || [[Willie Morris, October 21, 1963|Willie Morris]] || Mailer met Morris (1934-1999) in New York after Morris became editor of ''Harper’s'' in 1963.
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, November 4, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] ||
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, November 4, 1963|Alan Earney]] ||
|-
| November 5, 1963 || [[Adeline Lubell Naiman, November 5, 1963|Adeline Lubell Naiman]] || A college friend of Mailer’s sister Barbara, Lubell met Mailer in 1946.
|-
| November 9, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, November 9, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] || Mailer served in the Army with “Fig,” a teacher, novelist and native of Arkansas.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, November 26, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Edmund Skellings, November 26, 1963|Edmund Skellings]] || Skellings, then a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and an admirer of Mailer’s work, met Mailer at an ''Esquire'' symposium at the University of Iowa in December 1958.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[David Susskind, November 26, 1963|David Susskind]] || [[w:David Susskind|David Howard Susskind]] was an American producer of TV, movies, and stage plays and also a TV talk show host.
|-
| December 11, 1963 || [[Mary Jane Shoultz, December 11, 1963|Mary Jane Shoultz]] || Mary Jane and Ray Shoultz were acquaintances of Mailer’s.
|-
| December 15, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, December 15, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| December 17, 1963 || [[Mickey Knox, December 17, 1963|Mickey Knox]] || [[w:Mickey Knox|Knox]], one of Mailer’s closest friends, met Mailer in Hollywood in the summer of 1949.
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, December 20, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] ||
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Rita Halle Kleeman, December 20, 1963|Rita Halle Kleeman]] || Kleeman was a staff member at P.E.N., the international writers organization.
|-
| January 15, 1964 || [[Don Carpenter, January 15, 1964|Don Carpenter]] ||Carpenter (1931-1995) was a west coast novelist who corresponded regularly with Mailer in the 1960s.
|-
| January 16, 1964 || [[Vance Bourjaily, January 16, 1964|Vance Bourjaily]] ||The novelst Vance Bourjaily met Mailer in New York in 1951 and introduced him to several writers.
|-
| January 17, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 17, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-

| February 11, 1964 || [[Harvey Breit, February 11, 1964| Harvey Breit]] ||Mailer became friendly with Harvey Breit (1909-1968), a reporter and novelist who spent summers on Cape Cod.
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Mickey Knox, February 17, 1964|Mickey Knox]] ||Nothing came of the idea of having Orson Welles (1915-1984) play Henderson and Sonny Liston play Dahfu in a film version of Saul Bellow's ''Henderson in the Rain King'' (1959).
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Charles Schultz, February 17, 1964,|Charles Schultz]] ||Schultz was an official with the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences who invited Mailer to take part in a forum discussion.
|-
| February 19, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, February 19, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| March 16, 1964 || [[Vahan Gregory, March 16, 1964|Vahan Gregory]] ||The deadline for the sixth installment passed a week before Mailer wrote to Gregory, a literary acquaintance.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[George Lea, March 17, 1964|George Lea]] ||George Lea was writer friend.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[Martin Peretz, March 17, 1964|Martin Peretz]] || Now editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Peretz (1939-) was a professor at Harvard when Mailer met him in the early 1960s.
|-
| January 27, 1965 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 27, 1965| Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| February 25, 1965 || [[Diana, April 23, 1965|DIANA ATHILL]] ||
|-
| March 22, 1965 || [[RICHARD KLUGER, March 22, 1965|RICHARD KLUGER]] ||
|-
| March 23, 1965 || [[DINA ATHILL, March 23, 1965| DIANA ATHILL]] ||
|-
|-March 23, 1965 || [[ALAN Earney, March 23, 1965| ALAN Earney]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Jason Epstein, March 25, 1965| Jason Epstein]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Don Carpenter, March 25, 1965| Don Carpenter]] ||
|-
| March 25, 1965 || [[Don Carpenter, March 25, 1965| Don Carpenter]] ||
|-
| April 6, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, April 6, 1965| Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| April 20, 1965 || [[Donald Kaufmann, April 20, 1965| Donald Kaufmann]] ||
|-
| April 23, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, April 23, 1965| John W. Aldridge]] ||
| April 23, 1965 || [[Moos Mailer, April 23, 1965|Moos Mailer]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, June 8, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John William Corrington, June 8, 1965|John William Corrington]] || Corrington wrote a favorable review of the novel in the ''Chicago Review'' (No. 18) 1965.
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Roger Shattuck, June 8, 1965|Roger Shattuck]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, June 8, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| June 12, 1965 || [[John A. Meixner, June 12, 1965|John A. Meixner]] || Meixner was a writer friend.
|-
| July 14, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, July 14, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| August 17, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, August 17, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| August 26, 1965 || [[Irving J. Weiss, August 26, 1965|Irving J. Weiss]] || A literary host at a radio station in New York, Weiss sought Mailer’s involvement in a couple of literary projects.
|-
| February 28, 1966 || [[Lionel Abel, February 28, 1966|Lionel Abel]] || Abel (1911-2001) was a drama professor and critic who wrote for ''Partisan Review'' and moved in the same leftist intellectual circles as Mailer.
|-
| March 24, 1966|| [[Mann Rubin, March 24, 1966|Mann Rubin]] ||
|-
| April 16, 1966|| [[Lonnie L. Wells, April 16, 1966|Lonnie L. Wells]] || Wells was a Mailer fan.
|-
|}

{{Aad-letters}}
[[Category:Projects]]
[[Category:Full Text Books]]

Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969

2019-04-06T21:03:37Z

Waebo: /* The Letters */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Norman Mailer’s Letters on ''An American Dream'', 1963–1969}}
{{Aad-tabs}}
{{aade-sm}}

{{byline|type=Edited|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael}}

''Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press, 2004''. ([[04.7]])

===From the Introduction===
Until he wrote ''[[An American Dream]]'', his most evocative and lyrical novel, [[Norman Mailer]] did not invest his major fictional characters with his deepest concerns and beliefs: a desire to grow at all costs, a distrust of pure reason, a willingness to take risks, trust in the authority of the senses, faith in courage as the cardinal virtue, fear and loathing for the incipient totalitarianism of American life and, most importantly, a belief in an heroic but limited God locked in struggle with a powerful, wily Devil, conceivably with the fate of the universe in the balance. Stephen Richards Rojack, the novel’s protagonist, has these concerns and shares Mailer’s theological beliefs. Rojack is a war hero, former congressman, college professor, talk show host, celebrity intellectual and nascent alcoholic. Preternaturally alert to omens and portents and susceptible to every premonition, he hears voices, studies the phases of the moon, and waits for either cancer or madness to strike him. His wife Deborah taunts him with her infidelities and attacks his manhood in a variety of insidious ways, driving him to a physical attack that ends with her murder. Rojack then throws her body out of the apartment window ten stories down to the pavement on the east side of Manhattan. He claims that her fall was suicide, and the brunt of the story is devoted to his attempts to convince his and her friends, the police and Deborah's father, Barney Oswald Kelly, the “solicitor for the devil,” of his innocence. Narrated in an edgy, rococo style by Rojack, the novel shows Mailer at the height of his word power as he delineates the dread-filled inner life of his embattled hero. The air of the novel is haunted, swarming with demonic and divine presences, especially in the final chapter, when Rojack confronts Kelly in his penthouse apartment in the Waldorf Towers.

<div style="clear:both;"></div>
<div style="margin:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; padding:0.5em 0.2em 0.2em 0.3em; text-align:right; font-size: small;">[[Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969/Introduction|Continue Reading »]]</div>

== The Letters ==
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! style="min-width: 150px;" | Date
! style="min-width: 200px;" | To
! style="min-width: 200px;" | Notes
|-
| September 18, 1963 || [[Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos, September 18, 1963|Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos]] || Sergio Gutierrez-Olivos was the Chilean ambassador to the United States, 1963–1965.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, October 15, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] || [[w:André Deutsch|Andre Deutsch]] (1918–2000) was the principal director of Andre Deutsch Limited, Mailer’s British publisher from 1959–1966.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, October 15, 1963|Alan Earney]] || Alan Earney was an editor at Transworld Publishers Limited.
|-
| October 15, 1963 || [[Reed Whittemore, October 15, 1963|Reed Whittemore]] || [[w:Reed Whittemore|Reed Whittemore]], an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist, was the editor of ''Carleton Miscellany''.
|-
| October 16, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, October 16, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] || Eiichi Yaminishi was {{NM}}’s longtime Japanese translator.
|-
| October 21, 1963 || [[Willie Morris, October 21, 1963|Willie Morris]] || Mailer met Morris (1934-1999) in New York after Morris became editor of ''Harper’s'' in 1963.
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Andre Deutsch, November 4, 1963|Andre Deutsch]] ||
|-
| November 4, 1963 || [[Alan Earney, November 4, 1963|Alan Earney]] ||
|-
| November 5, 1963 || [[Adeline Lubell Naiman, November 5, 1963|Adeline Lubell Naiman]] || A college friend of Mailer’s sister Barbara, Lubell met Mailer in 1946.
|-
| November 9, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, November 9, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] || Mailer served in the Army with “Fig,” a teacher, novelist and native of Arkansas.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, November 26, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[Edmund Skellings, November 26, 1963|Edmund Skellings]] || Skellings, then a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and an admirer of Mailer’s work, met Mailer at an ''Esquire'' symposium at the University of Iowa in December 1958.
|-
| November 26, 1963 || [[David Susskind, November 26, 1963|David Susskind]] || [[w:David Susskind|David Howard Susskind]] was an American producer of TV, movies, and stage plays and also a TV talk show host.
|-
| December 11, 1963 || [[Mary Jane Shoultz, December 11, 1963|Mary Jane Shoultz]] || Mary Jane and Ray Shoultz were acquaintances of Mailer’s.
|-
| December 15, 1963 || [[Eiichi Yaminishi, December 15, 1963|Eiichi Yaminishi]] ||
|-
| December 17, 1963 || [[Mickey Knox, December 17, 1963|Mickey Knox]] || [[w:Mickey Knox|Knox]], one of Mailer’s closest friends, met Mailer in Hollywood in the summer of 1949.
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Francis Irby Gwaltney, December 20, 1963|Francis Irby Gwaltney]] ||
|-
| December 20, 1963 || [[Rita Halle Kleeman, December 20, 1963|Rita Halle Kleeman]] || Kleeman was a staff member at P.E.N., the international writers organization.
|-
| January 15, 1964 || [[Don Carpenter, January 15, 1964|Don Carpenter]] ||Carpenter (1931-1995) was a west coast novelist who corresponded regularly with Mailer in the 1960s.
|-
| January 16, 1964 || [[Vance Bourjaily, January 16, 1964|Vance Bourjaily]] ||The novelst Vance Bourjaily met Mailer in New York in 1951 and introduced him to several writers.
|-
| January 17, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 17, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-

| February 11, 1964 || [[Harvey Breit, February 11, 1964| Harvey Breit]] ||Mailer became friendly with Harvey Breit (1909-1968), a reporter and novelist who spent summers on Cape Cod.
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Mickey Knox, February 17, 1964|Mickey Knox]] ||Nothing came of the idea of having Orson Welles (1915-1984) play Henderson and Sonny Liston play Dahfu in a film version of Saul Bellow's ''Henderson in the Rain King'' (1959).
|-
| February 17, 1964 || [[Charles Schultz, February 17, 1964,|Charles Schultz]] ||Schultz was an official with the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences who invited Mailer to take part in a forum discussion.
|-
| February 19, 1964 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, February 19, 1964|Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
|-
| March 16, 1964 || [[Vahan Gregory, March 16, 1964|Vahan Gregory]] ||The deadline for the sixth installment passed a week before Mailer wrote to Gregory, a literary acquaintance.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[George Lea, March 17, 1964|George Lea]] ||George Lea was writer friend.
|-
| March 17, 1964 || [[Martin Peretz, March 17, 1964|Martin Peretz]] || Now editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Peretz (1939-) was a professor at Harvard when Mailer met him in the early 1960s.
|-
| January 27, 1965 || [[Eiichi Yamanishi, January 27, 1965| Eiichi Yamanishi]] ||
| April 23, 1965 || [[Moos Mailer, April 23, 1965|Moos Mailer]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John W. Aldridge, June 8, 1965|John W. Aldridge]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[John William Corrington, June 8, 1965|John William Corrington]] || Corrington wrote a favorable review of the novel in the ''Chicago Review'' (No. 18) 1965.
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Roger Shattuck, June 8, 1965|Roger Shattuck]] ||
|-
| June 8, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, June 8, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-
| June 12, 1965 || [[John A. Meixner, June 12, 1965|John A. Meixner]] || Meixner was a writer friend.
|-
| July 14, 1965 || [[Diana Trilling, July 14, 1965|Diana Trilling]] ||
|-

{{Aad-letters}}
[[Category:Projects]]
[[Category:Full Text Books]]

Norris Church Mailer

2019-04-06T02:06:03Z

Waebo: Minor changes

[[File: Norris Church Mailer.jpeg|thumb|Photo courtesy of the Norris Church Mailer Estate.]]
Norris Church Mailer (born Barbara Jean Davis, January 31, 1949, in Atkins, Arkansas – November 21, 2010, in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, New York)[1] ) was an American artist, actress, model, and author of several books. Her publications include the memoir, 'A Ticket to the Circus' and the novels ''Cheap Diamonds'' and ''Windchill Summer''. She was the mother of two children and stepmother of Norman Mailer's five children.

Originally from Atkins, Arkansas, Norris Church Mailer had successful careers in several fields. Norris didn't always have a career job her first job was at pickle factory worker.[] She graduated from Arkansas Polytechnic College, which allows her to explore for better jobs. She was at one point an art teacher, but she also was a successful model for the Wilhelmina modeling agency. She held several exhibits featuring her art and also acted in several movies, including Ragtime (1981) and The Executioner's Song (1982), as well performing on the television soap opera, All My Children.

Norris Church Mailer's near 33-year marriage to Norman Mailer is often the focus of reviews about her and her life. She described Norman Mailer as "the Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle." Norris defended Norman Mailer against critics who claimed he was a misogynist and sought out his advice on drafts of her novels. "A Ticket to the Circus" chronicles her relationship with Mailer.

In 2004, Wilkes University in Pennsylvania established the Norris Mailer Church Fellowship in creative writing in her honor. She died in 2010 of complications from gastrointestinal cancer.

* [[:Category: Written by Norris Church Mailer|Contributions]]
* [[Tributes to Norris Church Mailer]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer, Norris Church}}
[[Category:Contributors]]

==Citations==
{{Reflist|20em}}

==Works Cited==
{{Refbegin|40em}}

Norris Church Mailer

2019-04-06T02:01:55Z

Waebo: Minor changes

[[File: Norris Church Mailer.jpeg|thumb|Photo courtesy of the Norris Church Mailer Estate.]]
Norris Church Mailer (born Barbara Jean Davis, January 31, 1949, in Atkins, Arkansas – November 21, 2010, in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, New York)[1] ) was an American artist, actress, model, and author of several books. Her publications include the memoir, 'A Ticket to the Circus' and the novels ''Cheap Diamonds'' and ''Windchill Summer''. She was the mother of two children and stepmother of Norman Mailer's five children.

Originally from Atkins, Arkansas, Norris Church Mailer had successful careers in several fields. She was at one point an art teacher, but she also was a successful model for the Wilhelmina modeling agency. She held several exhibits featuring her art and also acted in several movies, including Ragtime (1981) and The Executioner's Song (1982), as well performing on the television soap opera, All My Children.

Norris Church Mailer's near 33-year marriage to Norman Mailer is often the focus of reviews about her and her life. She described Norman Mailer as "the Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle." Norris defended Norman Mailer against critics who claimed he was a misogynist and sought out his advice on drafts of her novels. "A Ticket to the Circus" chronicles her relationship with Mailer.

In 2004, Wilkes University in Pennsylvania established the Norris Mailer Church Fellowship in creative writing in her honor. She died in 2010 of complications from gastrointestinal cancer.

* [[:Category: Written by Norris Church Mailer|Contributions]]
* [[Tributes to Norris Church Mailer]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer, Norris Church}}
[[Category:Contributors]]

==Citations==
{{Reflist|20em}}

==Works Cited==
{{Refbegin|40em}}

Norris Church Mailer

2019-04-06T01:59:06Z

Waebo:

[[File:Norris Church Mailer.jpeg|thumb|Photo courtesy of the Norris Church Mailer Estate.]]
Norris Church Mailer (born Barbara Jean Davis, January 31, 1949 in Atkins, Arkansas – November 21, 2010 in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, New York)[1] ) was an American artist, actress, model, and author of several books. Her publications include the memoir, 'A Ticket to the Circus' and the novels ''Cheap Diamonds'' and ''Windchill Summer''. She was the mother of two children and stepmother of Norman Mailer's five children.

Originally from Atkins, Arkansas, Norris Church Mailer had successful careers in several fields. She was at one point an art teacher, but she also was a successful model for the Wilhelmina modeling agency. She held several exhibits featuring her art and also acted in several movies, including Ragtime (1981) and The Executioner's Song (1982), as well performing on the television soap opera, All My Children.

Norris Church Mailer's near 33 year marriage to Norman Mailer is often the focus of reviews about her and her life. She described Norman Mailer as "the Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle." Norris defended Norman Mailer against critics who claimed he was a misogynist and sought out his advice on drafts of her novels. "A Ticket to the Circus" chronicles her relationship with Mailer.

In 2004, Wilkes University in Pennsylvania established the Norris Mailer Church Fellowship in creative writing in her honor. She died in 2010 of complications from gastrointestinal cancer.

* [[:Category:Written by Norris Church Mailer|Contributions]]
* [[Tributes to Norris Church Mailer]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer, Norris Church}}
[[Category:Contributors]]

==Citations==
{{Reflist|20em}}

==Works Cited==
{{Refbegin|40em}}

Norris Church Mailer

2019-04-06T01:58:25Z

Waebo:

[[File: Norris Church Mailer.jpeg|thumb|Photo courtesy of the Norris Church Mailer Estate.]]
Norris Church Mailer (born Barbara Jean Davis, January 31, 1949, in Atkins, Arkansas – November 21, 2010, in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, New York)[1] ) was an American artist, actress, model, and author of several books. Her publications include the memoir, 'A Ticket to the Circus' and the novels ''Cheap Diamonds'' and ''Windchill Summer''. She was the mother of two children and stepmother of Norman Mailer's five children.

Originally from Atkins, Arkansas, Norris Church Mailer had successful careers in several fields. In the beginning, Norris started as a pickle factory worker and left the factory to go to college at Arkansas Polytechnic College. She was at one point an art teacher, but she also was a successful model for the Wilhelmina modeling agency. She held several exhibits featuring her art and also acted in several movies, including Ragtime (1981) and The Executioner's Song (1982), as well performing on the television soap opera, All My Children.

Norris Church Mailer's near 33-year marriage to Norman Mailer is often the focus of reviews about her and her life. She described Norman Mailer as "the Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle." Norris defended Norman Mailer against critics who claimed he was a misogynist and sought out his advice on drafts of her novels. "A Ticket to the Circus" chronicles her relationship with Mailer.

In 2004, Wilkes University in Pennsylvania established the Norris Mailer Church Fellowship in creative writing in her honor. She died in 2010 of complications from gastrointestinal cancer.

* [[:Category: Written by Norris Church Mailer|Contributions]]
* [[Tributes to Norris Church Mailer]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer, Norris Church}}
[[Category:Contributors]]

==Citations==
{{Reflist|20em}}

==Works Cited==
{{Refbegin|40em}}

Talk:Norris Church Mailer

2019-04-06T01:54:00Z

Waebo:

User:Waebo/sandbox

2019-04-04T01:36:35Z

Waebo: Created page with " Norman Mailer’s American Dream TIMOTHY EVANS IN ONE Of• HIS RECENT ESSAYS, Leslie Fiedler proposes that a new technology in a New World made both necessary and possib..."

Norman Mailer’s American Dream
TIMOTHY EVANS

IN ONE Of• HIS RECENT ESSAYS, Leslie Fiedler proposes that a new technology in a New World made both necessary and possible "the manufacture, the mass production, and the mass distribution of dreams.” Some of these were "dreams disguised as goods,” but of course they also reached their public dressed as art, poor and vulgar art, by and large; ”but what,” as Fiedler asks, ”can one expect of a population descended horn the culturally dispossessed of all nations of the world?"'
An image to reflect in accelerating expectations, to judge by the' Ragged Dicks and Tattered Toms it favored during the first great age of mass literature in America. Alger’s stereotype of struggle-and-success, and others like it, resonated with the dreams his readers dreamed; and behind those dreams was a latch in worldly success as a measure of individual humanity that reached back past the puritans’ doctrine of the calling to the Faustian core of Protestant ethics itself. But by the time the crash of 1f29 imposed its reality on the nation, a tradition had emerged among serious novelists that set them in imaginative opposition to the stereotype of struggle-and-success. Those who published the decisive works of the twenties and thirties—Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Scott FitzGerald, John Stein- beck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—a1l of them took on in some significant measure the task of demythification.
They struggled and, in true American fashion, they succeeded. They succeeded so thoroughly that only the grossest hacks find rite old stereotype a challenging target anymore. But if the example of Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins arrests to rite success of the stereotype’s enemies, it also raises a question about its obvious persistence in the popular imagination. Has the dream of success become a reflex of the mass psyche, a subliminal myth that no longer needs to be established or

159

Nourished in the public imagination? Is it somehow infused soon after, birth, or even passed on genetically, along with stronger teeth anal longer limbs? '

Such conjectures seem mild when compared to the hypothesis Norman Other broaches in his own bout with the stereotype, An American Dream. Here, a witty variant of the young man on the make is thwarted in an urban gothic melodrama that verges on vaudeville: stock characters and tacky extras abound, and the style is slaphappy with significance. Like all potboilers, it was intended to exceed the expectations of its readers, and judging by the critical response it stimulated, it was almost unanimously successful. "Mailer’s novel is bad,” wrote Stanley Edgar Hyman at the time it was published, ”in that absolute fashion that makes it unlikely that he could ever have written anything good.”' Other critics held back from this extremity, but even Mailer’s defenders were forced to the conclusion that An American Dream was a parody. For it is in many ways a shoddy and cynical performance, hacked out on schedule for serial publication, littered with barbarisms, and drastically over-motivated. It is easily dismissed on technical grounds: told in the first person, the novel relies on its hero’s rhetorical mysticism for both its narrative play and its thematic overplay. Since the ironies are at his expense, he must tell us more than he can plausibly know, which embarrasses the dream without its disguise. It also undercuts the authority of Mai1er’s hypothesis at its source. This is too bad because it’s one of his gaudier conceits that the stereotype of struggle-and-success is actually an archetype in disguise.
An upside-down archetype, one must immediately add, for the center
of this novel is an inverted Oe‹lipa1 compulsion. Just as. in Freud’s scheme, the murder of the father and incest with the mother initiated a new social order based on taboos surrounding those transgressions, so here, in An American Dream.•, Mailer’s formulation requires equally actual but reversed transgressions. Defined as she is in terms of Stephen Rojack's ambitions, his wealthy wife Deborah is the mother of his promise. When he kills her, he has the feeling he has pushed open “an enormous door." “I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. “ The act of murder changes the key of his consciousness and breaks him through into an archetypa1 region of the psyche. Jung describes the "instinctive data of the dark primitive psyche” as the component material of the archetype, and it is there that there novel

160 spring 1973

moves, into ”the real, the invisible cooks of consciousness,” when Stephen strangles his wife.
This is the territory Mailer staked out for himself in his Advertisements, which ended with a "prologue to a long novel” that would dramatize the themes he’d been discussing—"murder, suicide, orgy, psychosis,” as he listed them. The novel has never appeared, but the promise was tentative in the first place ”I do not know in all simple bitterness if I can make it," he wrote and the prologue ends in the conditional. But the work he had in mind was to be a "tale of heroes and villains, murderers and suicides, orgy-masters, perverts, and passionate lovers.” lt was to be organized into a narrative so radically schizoid that in place of a hero it would stage a contest among three candidates for that role. And, if the prologue provides an accurate sample, it was to be written in a rhetoric extreme enough to engage its author’s insight that “we hover at the edge of an orgy of language, the nihilism of meaning fair upon us.” The novel's projected starting point was to be a party at the home of one of Mailer’s candidates, Marion Faye, the “master pimp" of The Deer Park. His guests are said to constitute “an artist’s assortment of those contradictory and varied categories of people who made up the obdurate materials of new sociological alloy.” His home is described as an old rambling mansion still "alive with every murderous sleep it had ever suffered;” a wind-beaten, dream-ridden place not far from where the first Puritans landed, ”a house which had the capacity to set free, one upon the other, the dank sore-rotted assassins in the dungeons of a
family’s character." And his purposes are evidently murderous, for Marion
Faye, we are told, "had come to the point in his life, as he had foreseen in terror many a time, when the 8ux of his development, the discovery of the new beauties of his self-expression, depended on murdering a man, a particular can.”
This, then, is what we can see of Mailer's program for ”discovering the psychic anatomy of our republic." Whatever it sounds like in summary, it must have seemed to Mailer a way out of the imaginative impasse which afflicted him during the composition of Barbary Shore. He wrote that book as a Marxist whose commitment was still developing but whose "conscious themes” were solidly' political. "But my unconscious was much more interested in other matters,” as Mailer once observed in an interview referring to the themes discussed in Advertisement. ”Since the gulf between these conscious and unconscious themes
SOUTHWEST REVIEW 161

L

was vast and quite resistant to any quick literary coupling," he went on, “the tension to gel a bridge across resulted in the peculiar hothouse atmosphere of Barbary Shore.. . . And of course this difficulty kept haunting me from then on in all the work I did afterward.
If this novel is what it appears to be, its hero is the image of his author, and not only as "a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation." For Stephen Rojack has seen his great expectations dissipated and has reached the conclusion that he is a failure. The illusions he has lost were founded upon a moment of wartime heroism during which, possessed by some moonlight genius, he’d been able to overreach himself. This moment flourished into a term in the House of Representatives, during which he met Deborah, but his "secret
frightened romance with the phases of the moon"’ drew him out of ¡ '
public life and into a long professional tailspin. Rojack resembles Mailer’s first hero, Robert Hearn, who was also driven "to make the
world in his own image and impose his will upon it” but was finally forced to the discovery that "he does not have the passion or the confidence or the ruthlessness it takes; his intelligence is too skeptical, his disenchantment ... too thorough.'" But he resembles more closely one of Marion Faye’s rivals for the office of hero in Mailer’s projected novel: Rojack is, in fact, the realization of Dr. Joyce, the psychoanalyst, described in the prologue as a man who had become so overextended beyond his humane means, and had so compromised his career, his profession, and his intimate honor that he was contemplating suicide." But Dr. Joyce’s thematic responsibilities have fattened over the years, for he has been fudged with Marion Faye in An American Dream with the result that Stephen Rojack can never ghost away into the lure of suicide completely, for he must also walk about in most murderous need "with a chest full of hatred and a brain jammed to burst.“ So the dualities Mailer meant to dramatize in two radically different characters must fight for dominance within the limits of one. Rojack says de finds this both exhausting and exhilarating, but he “cannot even bear to explain” how he came to resemble Shawn Sergius, the third of Mailer’s contenders for the title of hero.
Since Rojack is some distance from being ”the only creative person- ality ever to dominate television” projected in Mailer’s prologue, his talk show amounts to a harmless literary allusion. But by merging the motives
162

of Marion Faye with those of Dr. Joyce, Mailer produces a thematic muddle, for the articulated distinction of his original design has been lost. Murder was the relationship with. death which expressed, in Marion Pune, the fundamental cannibalism to which success reduced its representatives, while the terms of Manure entailed suicide in a man like Dr. Joyce. Having combined the two impulses or one character, Mailer produces a caricature of the imaginative method by which he isolated them in the first place, a method astutely formulated by Richard Poirier: "Divide the material, argue the differences, reach a kind of stalemate and call it a ‘mystery.’ ”* What happens in An American Dream is that hip and square, atheist and mystic, murderer and suicide--all the terms of Mailer’s dialectic—stew together until the differences melt away, any- thing at all becomes admissible, and an archetype comes boiling into view. By following the course of Rojack’s crisis, it will be possible to see how all this happens.
He is a failure, then, incapable of realizing the potential of his marriage to an heiress, who despises him bitterly for his defeats. He wishes he could despise her for her wealth but knows chat he cannot completely, for it had, he remarks, “become the manifest of how unconsummated and unmasculine was the core of my force. It was like being married to a woman who would not relinquish her first lover.” That Deborah had not really relinquished her first lover she reveals just before her death. She tells Stephen she no longer loves him and remembers "the
finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things.” She has never told anyone about him, and she carries her secret with her when she dies; but Stephen later discovers that she was describing her father, who seduced her when she was fifteen. So Stephen has been a surrogate husband, at whom Deborah has clawed while she remained committed to her delicious father.
If Deborah is a man-caring bitch, she is also a kind of goddess. Her relationship with Stephen brings to mind the myth of Attis and Cybele, hut Deborah is not a representation of any particular Goddess in myth or legend. She possesses many of the particular qualities of female deities in Celtic and classical mythology; cataloging the many parallels and references would be redundant. It will be quicker to examine one in particular, Diana, the Roman Goddess, who is Luna in heaven, Diana on earth, and Hecate in hell.
It was Luna who presided over Stephen’s night of heroism during

Southwestern Review

the war, endowing him with special powers of insight and observation and leaving him with minute and vivid memories. One of Stephen’s victims “whimpered 'Mutter,’ one yelp from the first memory of the womb, and down he went into his own blood.” The association of death, mother, and the power of the moon is thus engraved on Stephen’s consciousness, which is why, when suicide beckons to him, it is the silent voice of the moon he hears. When he visits Deborah for the last time after pulling back from the seductions of Luna, it seems to him not at all exceptional ... that Deborah had been in touch with the moon and now had the word.”
Of the other two representations of Diana, Hecate, the goddess of the streets and toads, is also the patroness of enchantments. Stephen’s example of Deborah’s power to lay a curse relates her to Hecate:
Once after a fight with her, I had been given traffic tickets three times in fifteen minutes, once for going down a one-way street, once for jumping a red light, and once because the policeman in the last car did not like my
eye and decided I was drunk. That had all been in the form of a warning from Deborah, I was certain of that. I could see her waiting alone in bed, waving her long fingers languidly to spark the obedient diabolisms and traffic officers at her command.
It is into the street that Stephen casts Deborah's corpse, and she seems to linger there, where “there is ambush everywhere," to torment him after her death.
As for Diana, she is represented as tall, her hair dark ("She was a handsome woman, Deborah, she was big. With high heels she stood at least an inch over me. She had a huge mass of black hair.”) She is the goddess of the hunt and mistress of the woods. Stephen includes in his inventory of Deborah’s superiorities her skill at hunting—she considers the only suitable hunting companion for her would be”somebody who’s divine as a hunter"—and presents it in supernatural terms:

She did not see a forest like others. No, out of the cool and the damp, the scent of forest odor aromatic and soft with rot, Deborah drew a mood—she knew the spirit which created attention in the grove, she told me once she could sense that spirit watching her, and when it was replaced by something else, also watching her, well, there was an animal. And so there was.
So Deborah is a bitch and a goddess, and she's daddy's girl, and to all this Stephen is simply not equal. The opportunity she once held out

164

to him has curdled into spite and scorn, and her witching powers represent, to a man who has steeped himself in death and dread, a most intimate threat. When she threatens him with divorce, which would leave his spirit in its torment without fulfilling his ambitions, he murders her. The killing itself is half-tantrum and half-orgasm and when it‘s done Stephen, exhilarated, equips himself for the struggle with the police and the media that will follow the death of an heiress by "giving the maid a bang."
The maid has her spirits, too. She communicates to him sexually some of her qualities: "a host of the Devil’s best gifts were coming to me, mendacity, guile, a fine-edged cupidity for the stroke which steals, the wit to trick authority.” Afterward he is capable of viewing Deborah’s corpse and feeling a mean rage more spiteful and controlled than the madness that had seized him before.

She had spit on the future, my Deborah, she had spoiled my chance ... I had an impulse to go up to her and kick her ribs, grind my heel on her nose, drive the point of my shoe into her temple and kill her again, mill her good this time, kill her right. I stood there shuddering from the power of this desire, and comprehended that this was the first of the gifts I'd plucked from the alley, oh Jesus, and I sat down in a chair as if to master the new desires Ruta had sent my way.

This mood and these desires stir in Stephen the energy and cunning he will need to get around the perils of the urban jungle into which he cases Deborah‘s body. And the city itself turns up a prize to lead him on and give him good heart. For it is on the street, in the grotesque traffic pileup that attends upon Deborah in the East River Drive, that Stephen encounters the nightclub singer, Cherry. With the swift logic of a dream, they fall in love and agree to marry literally overnight, end Stephen feels a new life beginning within him, “sweet and perilous and so hard to fol1ow.” Redemption seems to beckon them both. Stephen will become a husband and a father and do the work he has not yet attempted, turning Freud upside down in a twenty-volume work of existential psychology; Cherry will choose lady over tramp and be a wife and mother. The presence within them promises that and speaks to Stephen of “the meaning of love for those who had betrayed it” ; he understands the meaning and says, “I think we have to be good,’ by which I meant that we would have to be brave."
Southwest Review 165

How brave he will need to be becomes clear to him after he is freed from the police by some unnamed intercession that can only have been the power of his father-in-law, Bernard Oswald Kelly. However well Ruta’s gifts may have equipped him for dealing with the ponce and the press, they are, he senses, unlikely to serve him very well against Kelly, from whom he must now free himself. And Cherry is not free either, it seems, for her former lover, the Negro singer Shago Martin, returns to devil her and Stephen. Given these complications, Stephen’s resolution to be brave diffuses. As he approaches Kelly’s, he feels three impulses: to return to Cherry and protect her from Shago, to go to Harlem and "pay for it” by enduring "some evil incident," and to confront and settle with Kelly. He understands that his choice in this must involve the exercise of the greatest possible courage if he is to make good on his vow to be brave. This allows him to reject his first impulse as being compromised by a desire to be with Cherry out of anxiety: "Some air of hurricane lay over my head.... She was my sanity, simple as that —and then I remembered the vow I had made in her bed.” But he doesn’t know which of the remaining impulses he fears more, Harlem or Kelly, and so lie doesn’t decide, and lets the taxi drift past Harlem. On the elevator to Kelly’s suite, though, he seems to conclude that he was in truth more frightened of Harlem. A voice inside him urges him there, and he pleads with it that he be left alone to love Cherry "some way not altogether deranged and doomed.... Let me love her and be sensible as well.” He dismisses the voice "and something departed from me, some etched image of Cherry’s face turned to mist.”
It is in this frame of mind that he begins his ordeal with Kelly. Ste- phen’s progress to this point has hem an impossibly tortuous sequence of struggles and victories. He has broken Deborah’s hold on him and kept the police, her minions, at bay. He has suffered his losses—his future on te1evision, his position at university —without panic or despair and overcome Shago to win Cherry, however provisionally, for himself. His moments with her have given him hope, however qualified, just as his time with Ruta brought him the powers he needed at the early stages of his trial. But in Bernard Oswald Kelly he faces his most formidable adversary, and it is here that the inverted Oedipal compulsion surfaces fully.
For Bernard Oswald Kelly is the father figure in Stephen's dream.
the mate of the dominating mother, Deborah. And what Kelly proposes,

166 SPRING 1975

or seems to Stephen to propose, is the completion of the taboo: incest, the pact of guilt between the murder and the mate of the victim. This is the “real thing” that Kelly speaks of at the beginning of his conversation with Stephen; this is what he has in mind when he talks of becoming friends. "I have confidence," He tells Stephen. "We’re closer than you expect.”
And they are close. Both are Manichaeans, believing in a God of pure spirit and a demiurge that reigns over matter. Both are upstarts, Kelly successful in using his wife's wealth and power, Stephen a failure, and both have had dealings with women who possess and cause them to possess magical powers. The dynamics of their meeting suggests the rela- tionship between the heroes of the naturalistic novel and those of the novel of "moral earnestness” as Mailer describes it in Cannibals at C/4ñi/idnf:

Where the original heroes of naturalism had been bold, self-centered, close to tragic, and up to their nostrils in their exertions to advance their own life and force the webs of society, so the hero of moral earnestness, the hero Herzog and the hero Levin in Mahmud’s A New Life, are men who repre- sent the contrary—passive, timid, other-directed, pathetic, up to the nostrils
in anguish: the world is stronger than they are; suicide calls. ,

Behind this confrontation is the debt of guilt for Deborah’s death, and the actual subject of discussion is the portioning out of that guilt. The discussion occurs between the father and the son who has had visited upon him the elder’s sins, a point Kelly brings up himself. He makes it clear to Stephen that he has a share in the guilt for Deborah’s death because he has had a part in making it happen. "I’m just as guilty, after all,” he say's. "I was a brute to her. She visited that brutishness back on you.”
And so the meeting between the two men is an effort on Kelly’s part to seal a pact of guilt, to "bury the ghost of Deborah by gorging on her corpse.” And one of the components of the pact is the homosexual act pro- posed to Hearn by General Cummins in The Naked and the Dead. Like Hearn before him, Stephen will be unable to consent, to follow the logic of one part of his actions through. There is, though, an exchange between the two men: "Desire came off Delly to jump the murderer of his beast, and unfamiliar desire stirred in me. echo of that desire to ear with Ruts on Deborah’s corpse.” This combination of outrages—incest and cannibalism

167

—represents an inversion of what in Freud’s analysis was the "memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions, and religion”—the ritual meal shared by the killers of the patriarch.’ Kelly’s proposition offers Stephen the opportunity to achieve in fact what lie wishes to accomplish in his great work: turning Freud on his head.
Part of the reason he cannot take this chance is that Stephen can say, with Fitzgerald, that "the very rich are different from you and me.” ln a note to the relevant chapter of Totem and Taboo Freud notes that murder and incest, offenses against the sacred laws of blood relationship, are the only ones recognized as crimes by the primitive community. In pulling Stephen within the webs of the summit, Kelly frees him from the Page of the community as it is expressed in the police stations and the tabloids. Back of all this is the Marxist orientation that ”quantity changes quality," an aphorism broadcast during one of Stephen’s television shows. Kelly theologizes along the same lines:
God and the devil are very attentive to people at the summit. 1 don’t know if they stir much in the average man's daily stew . . . but do you expect God or the devil left Lenin or Hitler or Churchill alone? No. They bid for favors and exact revenge... . There's nothing but magic at the top. It’s the little secret that a few of us keep to ourselves, but that, my friend, is one reason why it’s not so easy to get to the very top. Because you have to be ready to deal with the One or the Other, and Shae’s too much for the average good man on his way. Sooner or later, he decides to be mediocre, and put up with the middle
Stephen is here being initiated into the secrets of the summit, but the ' signs are he’d prefer to put up with the middle. His inability to “pitch
and tear and squat and lick, swill and grovel” with his father-in-law is connected with his inability to take the plunge at the moon’s bidding. He is unfit for the evil heroism that has been thrust upon him as a final result of his wartime moment and its attendant glimpse beyond the pale. Confronted with the expiatory completion of the taboo circle proposed by Kelly, Stephen falters and realizes he is caught in a position he cannot redeem. "I wanted to escape from that intelligence which let me know of murders in one direction and conceive of visits to Cherry in another, I wanted to be free of magic, the tongue of the Devil, the dread of the Lord, I wanted to be some sort of rational man again, nailed tight to details, reasonable, blind to the reach of the seas.”

168 SPRING 1975

It is this "rational man" in Stephen that has allied itself with the
“1ady" in Cherry after having contracted with Ruta, the devil's thrall.
.After his moment with Cherry the divided nature of his commitments
dawns fully upon him: "Like a petty criminal I had sold my jewels last
night to the Devil, and promised them again this morning to some child's
whisper. I had a literal sense of seed out on separate voyages, into the sea
of Cherry's womb, into the rich extinctions of Ruta's kitchen ."
Feeling this way, Stephen cannot complete the job he has begun by
murdering Deborah . He is literally of two minds, and three times in the
novel we see him teeter-tottering at the edge of the abyss, drawn, in different
ways each time, to perfect a relationship with suicide. Each time he
draws back. Realizing the possibilities of death, he is nonetheless drawn
to life. In another of Mailer's formulations, he is hip and square at once,
simultaneously an atheist and a mystic.
In the dialogue between the atheist and the mystic, the atheist is on the side
of life, rational life, undialectical life-since he conceives of death as emptiness
he can, no matter how weary or despairing, wish for nothing but more
life; his pride is that he does not transpose his weakness and spiritual fatigue
into a romantic longing for death, for such appreciation of death is then all
too capable of being elaborated by his imagination into a universe of meaningful
structure and moral orchestration.

These observations from "The White Negro" supply precisely the
terms of Stephen's self-division. In his wartime experience, he discovered
that death is as full of possibility, is perhaps even more dangerous, and
consequently more full of possibility, than life, and this discovery leads
him away from the will for life, the atheist's ability to think "that death
was zero, death was everybody's emptiness." This sense of things is dev-
loped further on Kelly's balcony, to the point that Stephen can feel
“some part of the heavens, some long cool vault at the entrance, a sense
of vast calm altogether aware of me. 'God exists,' I thought." But just
as the call to seal the pact is too much for another part of him, so too
something in him, some atheist, holds him back at the brink of suicide.
He buckles and rebels, so that at the end of hi~ encounter with the moor1
on Kelly's parapet he retreats, pleading with the mystic inside that he had
"lain with madness long enough." He rushes to his atheist's salvation,
Cherry, only to see her die, the fulfillment of a warning from his mystic's
voice on the way to Kelly's summit .

SOUTH WEST Review 169

So Stephen Rojack loses the square's life by refusing the hipster's
gambit, misses the sweet of fulfilled monogamy by failing to lay its
corrupted Freudian ghost. It's a measure of the novel's insufficiency that
the terms of its hero's defeat arise out of a subplot so clearly cooked up,
so carelessly improvised, as the romance between Stephen and Cherry;
but other measures have been taken, and still, others will no doubt follow.
For An American Dream is the closest Mailer has come to fulfilling
the great imaginative project he advertised so vividly fifteen years age.
Something happened to the art of the novel in postwar America, as Joseph
Heller, Mailer 's exact contemporary, might be construed as saying in the
title of his second book. But so can all the rest of the returned war veterans
be construed as saying, one way and another; only: Mailer among
them has expressed and embodied his imaginative plight so vividly in a
single work. Given the failure of postwar realism, this is probably as
good a way as any to "create an image of our time which will und undoubtedly
stand as authoritative for this generation."' But it also parodies the thematic
conceptions which Mailer hoped would support a novel intended
to carry on the work of Dostoevski and Tolstoy , Stendhal and Proust,
Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway. And this raises the possibility that
Mailer may end his career as novelist the way so many American writers
before him have done, "by travestying his own style and themes," in Fiedler's
words, "by mocking himself."
NOTES
1. Leslie Fiedler, "The Dream of the New," in David .Madden, ed., American
Dreams. American Nightmares (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, 1970) , p. 21.
2. Stanley Edgar Hi-roan, "Norm an Mailer's Yummy Rump ," in Leo Brandy . ed.,
Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice:-Hall,
1972) , p. 104.
3. Steven Marcus, "An interview with Norman Mailer," in Braudy, Norma1J
Mailer, p. 29.
4. Ibid.
5. Fiedler, in Braudy, Norman Mailer, p. 27.
6. lhab Hassan, Radical Innocence (New York: Harperr & Row. 1996) . p. 147.
7. Richard Poirier, "The Ups and Downs of Norman Mailer," in Braudy, Norman,
Mailer, p. 17 3.
8. Sigmund Freud. Totem and Taboo , in A. A. Brill. ed., The Basic writing of
Sigmund Freud (New York: Modem Library. 1938), p. 916
9. John \Y/. Aldridge, "The Energy of New Success," in Braudy. Norman Mailer,
p. 119.
170 SPRING 1975

User:Waebo

2019-04-04T01:27:08Z

Waebo: Created page with "'''<big>Brief Bio</big>''' <big>Hello Everyone,</big> <br> My name is Rian. I am a graduate at MGA with a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology. I had live in Warner..."

'''<big>Brief Bio</big>'''

<big>Hello Everyone,</big>

<br>
My name is Rian. I am a graduate at MGA with a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology. I had live in Warner Robins for about 25 years. I am always thriving to continue in learning because in life you are always learning. I plan on using my experience throughout my career.

<big>Career Experience</big>

<br>
I work for MGA as Information Support Specialist. I handle all audio and video events for the Warner Robins campus. I am in charge of maintenance for computers, projectors, and software. I plan on adventuring out to other fields in Information Technology to learn a vast variety of skills.

<big>Personal Life</big>

<br>
I am an avid bowler for a league. I have yet to bowl a perfect game, which is a 300 game, but the closest I have come is a 279. I do enjoy riding my bicycle to work because it gives me a little freedom before I arrive at work. I live about 30 minutes away from work, which is a nice bike ride if the weather is right. On the weekends I am a typical gamer/ nerd because some of my friends like to get together and hang out and play video games. I believe video games are cheap entertainment.