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

An American Dream

Expanded

Bibliography

Letters

Timeline

Word Count Comparison

Credits

Edited by
J. Michael Lennon

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Note: Copyright ©2004 by Sligo Press. (04.7)
67 South Pioneer Avenue, Shavertown, PA 18708

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 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 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 was a west coast novelist who corresponded regularly with Mailer in the 1960s.
January 16, 1964	Vance Bourjaily	Bourjaily, an American novelist, met Mailer in 1951.
January 17, 1964	Eiichi Yaminishi
February 11, 1964	Harvey Breit	Mailer became friendly with Harvey Breit, a reporter and novelist who spent summers on Cape Cod.
February 17, 1964	Mickey Knox
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 Yaminishi
March 16, 1964	Vahan Gregory	Gregory was a literary acquaintance of Mailer’s.
March 17, 1964	George Lea	George Lea was writer friend.
March 17, 1964	Martin Peretz	Mailer met Peretz, Harvard professor and editor-in-chief of The New Republic, in the early 1960s.
April 16, 1964	Andre Deutsch
April 17, 1964	Louis and Moos Mailer	Louis Mailer (his wife was Moos) was the brother of Mailer's father, Isaac Barnett “Barney” Mailer and lived in South Africa.
April 19, 1964	Mickey Knox
May 15, 1964	Francis Irby Gwaltney
June 1, 1964	Don Carpenter
June 2, 1964	Mrs. Jose Casanova	Mrs. Casanova was a Mailer fan.
June 2, 1964	Mickey Knox
July 5, 1964	Diana Athill
July 6, 1964	Pete Hamill	Journalist and novelist, Pete Hamill had been a friend of Mailer since they met in Chicago in 1962.
July 7, 1964	Eiichi Yaminishi
August 21, 1964	Diana Athill
September 29, 1964	Robert F. Lucid	Longtime professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Lucid was one of Mailer’s closest friends and authorized biographer until Lucid died in 2006.
October 5, 1964	Don Carpenter
November 4, 1964	Andre Deutsch
December 15, 1964	Ester Whitby	Esther Whitby was a Mailer fan.
December 18, 1964	Arnold Kemp	Kemp met Mailer in Bellevue Hospital where Mailer was under psychiatric observation after he stabbed Adele with a penknife on 20 September 1960.
December 18, 1964	Mickey Knox
December 18, 1964	Bill McLaughlin	McLaughlin was a Mailer fan.
December 21, 1964	Virginia Mangrum	Mangrum was still another Mailer fan.
January 27, 1965	Eiichi Yaminishi
February 25, 1965	Diana Athill
March 22, 1965	Richard Kluger	Kluger was an editor at the literary supplement, Book Week.
March 23, 1965	Diana Athill
March 23, 1965	Alan Earney
March 25, 1965	Jason Epstein	Epstein was the longtime editorial director at Random House, where he was Mailer’s editor.
March 25, 1965	Don Carpenter
March 25, 1965	Diana Trilling	Trilling was a literary critic and wife of the Columbia professor and man of letters, Lionel Trilling.
April 6, 1965	Diana Trilling
April 20, 1965	Donald Kaufmann	Kaufmann was a professor at the University of Alaska who became friendly with Mailer when he spoke at the University in 1965.
April 23, 1965	John W. Aldridge	John W. Aldridge 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.
April 23, 1965	Moos Mailer
June 8, 1965	John W. Aldridge
June 8, 1965	John William Corrington	Corrington wrote a favorable review of AAD in the Chicago Review in 1965.
June 8, 1965	Roger Shattuck	Mailer met Roger Shattuck, the art critic, in Brooklyn in the 1950s.
June 8, 1965	Diana Trilling
June 12, 1965	John A. Meixner	Meixner was a writer friend.
July 14, 1965	Diana Trilling
August 17, 1965	John W. Aldridge
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	Abel 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	Rubin wrote the first screenplay for An American Dream.
April 16, 1966	Lonnie L. Wells	Wells was a Mailer fan.
September 24, 1966	Susan Abrams	Abrams was a Mailer fan.
September 24, 1966	Yale M. Udoff
September 24, 1966	Nancy Weber	Weber, an American writer, interviewed Mailer in the March 1965 New York Post, one of only a few interviews he gave on the novel before it was published.
September 25, 1966	Louis and Moos Mailer
September 26, 1966	Sanford Sternlicht	Sanford Sternlicht was an English professor at New York State University College at Oswego.
1969	Whit Burnett	Burnett published Mailer’s story Mailer’s story “The Greatest Thing in the World” in November 1941, marking the beginning of Mailer’s literary career.