Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969
| An American Dream | Expanded | Bibliography | Letters | Timeline | Word Count Comparison | Credits |
An American Dream Expanded.
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.
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. |
| April 23, 1965 | Moos Mailer | |
| June 8, 1965 | John W. Aldridge | |
| 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 | Diana Trilling | |
| June 12, 1965 | John A. Meixner | Meixner was a writer friend. |
| July 14, 1965 | Diana Trilling |
