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 ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966), a collection of diverse pieces, can be read as a sort of exegesis for ''An American Dream'' (1964, 1965). The two books function like artistic pendants, parallel texts. The extension of speculations and meditations begun in ''Lipton’s'' are developed much further in ''Cannibals'' for publication. And just as Mailer began to make use of the dialogue form in his published existential and psychological musings in ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963), in ''Cannibals'' the technique—echoing the many dialogues in Jung’s ''Red Book''—comes to full fruition. Two dialogues are of particular significance. “The Metaphysics of the Belly” posits intuition as messages from the unconscious that can transform perception, perception that is both physical and psychic, that is, integrated.{{sfn|Mailer|1966|pp=263–265}} It is such messages from the unconscious that continually urge themselves on the hero Rojack in ''An American Dream'', the potential source of his transformation: “I felt as if I had crossed a chasm of time and was some new breed of man.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=81}} In the other major dialogue “The Political Economy of Time,” Mailer explicitly connects body and soul into a “being” and connects the soul with the unconscious.{{sfn|Mailer|1966|pp=287–373}} This dialogue particularly is in turn strikingly (if annoyingly as some of Mailer’s critics claimed) similar to the dialogue in Chapter 6 of ''American Dream'' between Rojack and his heroine Cherry, a dialogue that repeats much of what Mailer wrote in ''Lipton’s'' about the struggle between Soul and Society.
-During the writing of ''An American Dream'', Mailer was in a state of personal crisis once again, perhaps even worse than that during his writing of ''Lipton’s''. Looking back on that period in ''Existential Errands'' (1972), Mailer described it as one of the lowest, despairing points of his life. The tone of ''The Presidential Papers'' reflects that crisis, as ''Lipton’s'' reflects the earlier one, but his collections of poems ''Deaths for the Ladies (and other disasters)'' (1962) strikes the tone even more emphatically. His failing marriage to Adele ended with her stabbing in 1960 during a drunken fight, his 1962 marriage to Lady Jeanne Campbell had collapsed, and in late 1964 he had married Beverly Bentley. Although he had found his voice, he was still a man who had not yet come through. ''An American Dream'' can be read as a fictionalized extension of ''Lipton’s'', another public extension and development. But this time, in ''American Dream'', with all the archetypal figures and dialogues of mythopoetic art, the unconscious material is fully fleshed out in narrative. It does the novel no disservice to argue that it is a deeply if partially autobiographical plunge into powerful unconscious material and filled with figures who test, threaten, and help the hero in his extreme state of “emotional exhaustion and existential disorientation” during his quest for renewal. Mailer described the novel’s originality as his attempt to write “the dramatic history of a man’s soul over thirty-two hours . . . a time of intense despair.”{{Sfn|Mailer|2014|p=350}}{{efn|See letter to Eiichi Yamanishi, June3,1965, {{harvtxt|Mailer|2014|p=350}}. ''An American Dream'', especially, rewards archetypal analysis as a story of the classic hero’s journey (crisis-descent-return), a quest and battle for wholeness arising out of traumatic psychic disruption. At the same time, it represents the commonplace, almost banal, reading experience of the much-worked-over conventions of crime fiction and the familiar elements of the mythic heroic quest. But it is this very narrative mundanity that also makes the novel one of Mailer’s most mythopoetic. As Mailer put it in his April 23, 1965, letter to John Aldridge, “The narrative clichés were chosen precisely because I felt they had been despised so long that a novelistic magic had returned to them.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=346}} }}
+During the writing of ''An American Dream'', Mailer was in a state of personal crisis once again, perhaps even worse than that during his writing of ''Lipton’s''. Looking back on that period in ''Existential Errands'' (1972), Mailer described it as one of the lowest, despairing points of his life. The tone of ''The Presidential Papers'' reflects that crisis, as ''Lipton’s'' reflects the earlier one, but his collections of poems ''Deaths for the Ladies (and other disasters)'' (1962) strikes the tone even more emphatically. His failing marriage to Adele ended with her stabbing in 1960 during a drunken fight, his 1962 marriage to Lady Jeanne Campbell had collapsed, and in late 1964 he had married Beverly Bentley. Although he had found his voice, he was still a man who had not yet come through. ''An American Dream'' can be read as a fictionalized extension of ''Lipton’s'', another public extension and development. But this time, in ''American Dream'', with all the archetypal figures and dialogues of mythopoetic art, the unconscious material is fully fleshed out in narrative. It does the novel no disservice to argue that it is a deeply if partially autobiographical plunge into powerful unconscious material and filled with figures who test, threaten, and help the hero in his extreme state of “emotional exhaustion and existential disorientation” during his quest for renewal. Mailer described the novel’s originality as his attempt to write “the dramatic history of a man’s soul over thirty-two hours . . . a time of intense despair.”{{Sfn|Mailer|2014|p=350}}{{efn|See letter to Eiichi Yamanishi, June 3, 1965, {{harvtxt|Mailer|2014|p=350}}. ''An American Dream'', especially, rewards archetypal analysis as a story of the classic hero’s journey (crisis-descent-return), a quest and battle for wholeness arising out of traumatic psychic disruption. At the same time, it represents the commonplace, almost banal, reading experience of the much-worked-over conventions of crime fiction and the familiar elements of the mythic heroic quest. But it is this very narrative mundanity that also makes the novel one of Mailer’s most mythopoetic. As Mailer put it in his April 23, 1965, letter to John Aldridge, “The narrative clichés were chosen precisely because I felt they had been despised so long that a novelistic magic had returned to them.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=346}} }}
 Two years later, Mailer writes a novel of a very different kind that nonetheless carries forth the themes first arising out of ''Lipton’s Journal''. ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967) is Mailer’s Swiftian-satirical, libidinous, Dionysian, darkly humorous rant, complete with mythic rituals, dialogues, and confrontations among archetypal figures. It is Mailer’s rant against the status quo of the military-industrial society that peaked in the 1960s. A spontaneous rant in the form of an inspired tour de force of youthful alienation from a murderous, hyper-technological society that desacralizes all elements of the ancient hunt ritual in a rapacious desire for complete domination over man and nature. It is the cry of Mailer’s soul-rage (embodied in the trickster-fool narrator D.J., “disk jockey to the world”). Mailer’s rage expresses his homeodynamic “er” (the vital force of his unconscious, as he describes the “er” in ''Lipton’s'') pitted against a corporate America that chose devastating technological warfare in a far-off Asian jungle. Warfare America would eventually lose. The satirical obscenity in the novel is nothing compared to the obscene lies and acts that enabled the war in Vietnam and took more than three million lives (half a Holocaust) and wasted millions of other lives of survivors and their families. Back in 1955 in ''Lipton’s'' Mailer also had been already trying out part of his narrative strategy in ''Vietnam''? That is, his theory of human beings as “receivers and senders of electric waves”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/174|#174]]}} and of the radio as providing “an ear” into one’s unconscious, “a vital experience longed for,” giving us “electric communication.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/344|#344]]}} Mailer went so far as to propose in ''Lipton’s'' that his wife Adele could be “a hipster-lady” if she could “m.c.” her own radio program.{{Sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 22, 1955/681|#681]]}} Adele, thereby, might be seen as an early prototype in Mailer’s mind for the narrator of ''Vietnam?'' as a D.J. who beams her/his “grassed out” hipster rant across the collective “magnetic-electro fief” to the American ear.