Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969/Introduction: Difference between revisions

In early November ''The Presidential Papers'' was published, about three weeks before President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. The collection contained most of his columns, several poems, his September 1962 debate with [[w:William F. Buckley Jr.|William F. Buckley, Jr.]] on the role of the Right Wing, and other assorted prose including his now-celebrated account of the 1960 political conventions, “[[60.9|Superman Comes to the Supermarket]],” also considered to be one of the foundation stones of the “New Journalism.” Although Mailer insisted then and now that he is first and foremost a novelist, the collection contained only one piece of fiction, “Truth and Being; Nothing and Time: A Broken Fragment from a Long Novel.” He had been working on this long novel, or “the big novel,” as he called it, off and on ever since his Hollywood novel, ''[[The Deer Park]]'' came out in 1955. In 1959 he had raised the stakes by announcing in ''[[Advertisements for Myself]]'', his first collection of assorted writings, that within ten years he intended to “try to hit the longest ball ever to go up in the hurricane air of our American letters,” a novel that “Dostoevski and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read.”<ref>''Advertisements for Myself'', 477.</ref> In the fall of 1963, however, this big novel was nowhere near completion. Mailer was worried that he might never get back to it, and indeed he never did.

During their stay in Las Vegas, Mailer and Beverly went though some emotional somersaults. Their turbulent relationship, and his other experiences on the long cross-country drive, gave him the idea of a short novel focused on the evolving relationship of a man and woman, lovers, driving cross-country to Las Vegas to see the Patterson-Liston rematch. Back in New York in late summer, he began thinking seriously about this short novel and along the way had a brainstorm about how to publish it. In consultation with his long-time lawyer, cousin Cy Rembar, and his new agent, Scott Meredith, Mailer decided to write it first as a serial novel in a magazine in the manner of nineteenth and early twentieth century novelists: Balzac, Zola, Thackeray, Hardy, Melville, Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Andre Gide, John O'Hara and J. P. Marquand. His primary models, however, were Dickens and Dostoyevsky, who unlike most of the other novelists named above did not complete their serial novels before the first installments appeared. There was no thought of having the entire manuscript in hand in the manner of Henry James. Recognizing his inability to remain sequestered in a long, deliberate effort on a big, Proustian novel while the country was transmogrifying, Mailer decided to put together a deal that would more or less force him to produce a short, dramatic novel in less than a year, and also bring in enough cash to pay his expenses for a couple of more years. Because he already had a column going at ''Esquire'', it was the obvious choice for first publication. Sometime after his return from the cross-country trip, Mailer proposed to [[w:Harold Hayes|Harold Hayes]], the editor of ''Esquire'', that he write a novel in eight installments of 10,000 words apiece that would run in the magazine from January to August 1964.<ref>The richest account of the circumstances surrounding the publication of the novel in ''Esquire'' is Carol Polsgrove's ''It Wasn't Pretty, But Didn’t We Have Fun: “Esquire” in the Sixties'' (W.W. Norton 1995). See also Hilary Mills, ''Mailer: A Biography'' (Empire Books 1982); and Peter Manso, ''Mailer: His Life and Times'' (Simon and Schuster 1985). See also the [[Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969/Timeline of Events, 1962–1966|timeline]] of some of the key events in Mailer’s life and the life of the nation from 1962 to 1966.</ref> Hayes accepted enthusiastically.