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=Sandbox Space for John William Corrington's "An American Dreamer" Essay=
=Sandbox Space for John William Corrington's "An American Dreamer" Essay=
===AN AMERICAN DREAMER===
===AN AMERICAN DREAMER BY JOHN WILLIAM CORRINGTON===
''There is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream-life of the nation.'' <br>
''There is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream-life of the nation.'' <br>
"The Existential Hero" in ''The Presidential Papers''
"The Existential Hero" in ''The Presidential Papers''
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The lines above provide both the myth and the text for understanding Norman Mailer's recent work. If one cannot grasp the text, will not perceive the ''mythos'', one is lost at the beginning. Such is precisely the condition of Mailer's critics: lost. Smashed in the face by Mailer's unbelievable vitality and matchless prose-wit, they move away from ''An American Dream'' as if Dial Press had booby-trapped that caricature flag on the dust jacket. At least so with the younger and cagier critics. One moves carefully in this territory. Mailer is certainly a pestilence and probably mad, the critic avers, but like any unbroken beast, he may yet be deadly to a tender reputation. He might, for all his words and ''merdes'', become . . . "lastingly significant." And so, palpably unable to understand him, one fires explosive bullets from a long distance. Of small calibre. With a silencer. The critic's game, except when dealing with a surely worthless thing, is Safety First.  
The lines above provide both the myth and the text for understanding Norman Mailer's recent work. If one cannot grasp the text, will not perceive the ''mythos'', one is lost at the beginning. Such is precisely the condition of Mailer's critics: lost. Smashed in the face by Mailer's unbelievable vitality and matchless prose-wit, they move away from ''An American Dream'' as if Dial Press had booby-trapped that caricature flag on the dust jacket. At least so with the younger and cagier critics. One moves carefully in this territory. Mailer is certainly a pestilence and probably mad, the critic avers, but like any unbroken beast, he may yet be deadly to a tender reputation. He might, for all his words and ''merdes'', become . . . "lastingly significant." And so, palpably unable to understand him, one fires explosive bullets from a long distance. Of small calibre. With a silencer. The critic's game, except when dealing with a surely worthless thing, is Safety First.  


With notable exceptions. In the case of ''An American Dream'', one such exception is Granville Hicks of ''The Saturday Review.'' His "Literary Horizons" is the column which asks the question, Is ''An American Dream'' a hoax or . . . something worse? He is confronted with a novel by the only man on the continent who has, at present, the faintest pretension to first rank, and, discussing the dust-jacket blurb (a practice generally confined to book-club ladies reviewing for ''The Flagstaff Sun'') says,


==References/Sources==
''The jacket indicates that serial publications had begun in ''Esquire'' before the book was finished: "Mailer undertook to write ''An American Dream'' under the same conditions of serial deadline that Conrad, Dickens, and Dostoevsky met in their day." (That, I think, is the extent of the resemblance between this work and the work of the aforementioned authors.)
[[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1asxDzRLKZYEn0uyZUHs0TnxIdBATVrjL Corrington's An American Dreamer Essay]]


But despite this disclaimer, ''An American Dream'' precisely locates in the tradition of Dostoyevsky and Conrad (at their best), though, in truth, the very idea of it would have sent Dickens back to the shoe-blacking factory in near-collapse. What, in plain and obvious fact, could be more Dostoyevshian than Mailer's plot? Is it less believable than ''The Brothers Karamazov''? Is Rojack's motivation not more "typical" than the scrambled Nietzscheanism of Raskolnikov? if, as many commentators would have us believe, Dostyouevsky is a proto-existentialist, how-and why-are we to escape the vague and almost hallucinatory agony of a Russian student and deny a similar reality in Stephen Rojack?


=Sandbox Space for Letters Template=
Example Format Begins here:<br>
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{{hatnote|Mailer’s letter to Gutierres-Olivos, the Chilean ambassador to the United States, is the first to acknowledge his plan to write ''[[An American Dream]]''. He began the novel shortly after writing the letter.}}
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{{quote box|align=left|fontsize=110%|width=60%|{{NMletter}}
:::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights
:::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York


September 18, 1963


Dear Señor Gutierres-Olivos,
==References/Sources==
 
[[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1asxDzRLKZYEn0uyZUHs0TnxIdBATVrjL Corrington's An American Dreamer Essay]]
I want to thank you for your invitation to take part in the round table on October 10, but I fear I must say no because I expect to be away in New England at that time, working on a novel.
 
:::::::::::::::Yours sincerely,<br />
:::::::::::::::Norman Mailer
}}
 
{{Aad-letters}}
Example Format Ends here.
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