Bentley and Mailer took a long car trip, notably visited an army buddy "Fig" Gwaltney in Arkansas, viewed an autopsy of a cancer victim, watched the Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson fight in Las Vegas, and spent time with the Beats in San Francisco.
[6] Mailer's has similarities with Rojack: They both attended Harvard, served in World War II, had an interest in political office, and appeared on talk shows.
Rojack makes the death appear as a suicide, and maintains his innocence no matter how intense the scrutiny or severe the consequences.
Rojack feels liberated by the violence and imagines himself receiving messages from the Moon, perceiving voices that command him to deny his guilt.
In the course of the next twenty four hours, Rojack sets his focus against the New York City Police Department, the intimidation of an erratic black entertainer who draws a knife on him, and the gathered political clout of his dead wife's father, Barney Oswald Kelly, who suggests that higher political sources have an interest in Rojack's fate.
He then returns to Deborah's room, cleans up the evidence of murder, then throws her over the balcony making her death appear as a suicide.
Rojack learns that one of the cars in the pile-up caused by Deborah was Eddie Ganucci, a mob boss wanted on a subpoena.
Rojack confesses to the murder of Deborah, then walks the parapet around the roof of the building, hitting Kelly with Shago's umbrella before escaping.
[11] Gordon finds that Mailer tempers the shock of An American Dream's violence by using a combination of flashback sequences, playful, heavily stylized language, and an abundance of mythical, fairy tale imagery to evoke an exaggerated, dreamlike psychological fantasy.
[15] Barry H. Leeds, in his Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer, suggests two primary structural patterns: one is Rojack's pilgrimage from "damnation and madness to salvation and sanity" and the other is the geometrical sexual connections shared by the characters.
[19] Like Mailer's Hipster, Rojack does not live until he has experienced death — so his murder of Deborah frees him from his hollow public life and initiates his transformation.
[20] It's only through the lowest and most severe forms of physical transgression that Rojack, like Mailer's Hipster is able to begin his journey toward psychic redemption.
[21] Rojack's journey reflects a seminal theme for Mailer in the importance of growth by confronting serious existential situations with courage.
[22] In a 1963 letter, Mailer defines what he means by "existentialism" as "that character can dissolve in one stricken event and re-form in startling new fashion".
[31] An American Dream was controversial for its portrayal and treatment of women, and was critiqued by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics.
Millett notes that "Rojack belongs to the oldest ruling class in the world, and like one of Faulkner's ancient retainers of a lost cause, he is making his stand on the preservation of a social hierarchy that sees itself as threatened with extinction.
Both Dostoyevsky and Dreiser, in An American Tragedy gradually created in their murderers an acceptance of responsibility for the violation of life which their actions constituted, and both transcend their crimes through atonement.
Rojack has some singularity in being one of the first literary characters to get away with murder; he is surely the first hero as homicide to rejoice in his crime and never really lose his creator's support.
[41] American culture, Justin Shaw states, has a tradition in which society expects men to achieve the "self-made mode of masculinity".
[42] Betty Friedan writes in The Feminine Mystique that men, in other words, were not enemies but "fellow victims" of society's expected and assigned gender roles.
Maggie McKinley argues that Mailer uses "violence as a literary device that facilitates an analysis of his philosophies surrounding existential freedoms, social oppression, and gendered relationships".
[48] Robert Merrill posits that An American Dream seems to suggest violence "is not an intolerable aberration but an extreme example of life's essential irrationality".
[17] An American Dream sold well and spent six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, reaching number eight in April 1965.
[57] While critics like Granville Hicks, Philip Rahv, Roger Shattuck, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Tom Wolfe called An American Dream a failure,[58] the novel has strong defenders, notably critics Leo Bersani, Richard Rhodes, Paul Pickrel, Richard Poirier, and Barry H.
[59] Writing one of the first and most positive reviews in Life, John Aldridge stated that An American Dream "transcends the conventional limits of blasphemy to expose the struggle toward psychic redemption which is the daily warfare of our hidden outlaw selves".
[61] Conrad Knickerbocker writes in The New York Times that Mailer "is one of the few really interesting writers anywhere",[62] and that An American Dream "defines the American style by presenting the most extreme of our realities — murder, love and spirit strangulated, the corruption of power and the powerful, the sacrifice of self to image, all of it mix mastered in booze and heat-and-serve sex, giving off the smell of burning rubber to the sound of sirens".
[49] Tony Tanner posits that a few critics likely found An American Dream to be "outrageous" due to their perception of it as a simple narrative and not as a surrealist work.
[64] Stanley Edgar Hyman describes An American Dream as a dreadful novel and says it's the worst that he has read in years.
[66] An American Dream was adapted for film in 1966 starring Stuart Whitman as Stephen Rojack, Eleanor Parker as his wife, and Janet Leigh as Cherry McMahon.
Johnny Mandel (music) and Paul Francis Webster (lyrics) were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song for "A Time for Love."