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

An American Dream

Expanded

Bibliography

Letters

Timeline

Word Count Comparison

Credits

This page is part of
An American Dream Expanded.

Edited by
J. Michael Lennon

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.

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The Letters

Date	To	Notes
September 18, 1963	Ambassador Gutierres-Olivos	Sergio Gutierrez-Olivos was the Chilean ambassador to the United States, 1963–1965.
October 15, 1963	Andre 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	Alan Earney was an editor at Transworld Publishers Limited.
October 15, 1963	Reed Whittemore	Reed Whittemore, an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist, was the editor of Carleton Miscellany.
October 16, 1963	Eiichi Yaminishi	Eiichi Yaminishi was Mailer’s longtime Japanese translator.
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	Alan Earney
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	Mailer served in the Army with “Fig,” a teacher, novelist and native of Arkansas.
November 26, 1963	Eiichi Yaminishi
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	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	Mary Jane and Ray Shoultz were acquaintances of Mailer’s.
December 15, 1963	Eiichi Yaminishi
December 17, 1963	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	Rita Halle Kleeman	Kleeman was a staff member at P.E.N., the international writers organization.
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	The novelst Vance Bourjaily met Mailer in New York in 1951 and introduced him to several writers.
January 17, 1964	Eiichi Yamanishi
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	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	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
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	George Lea was writer friend.
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.