With "Superman", Mailer extends New Journalism by taking an active role in the narrative, which would characterize much of his subsequent journalistic style and lead to his Pulitzer Prize for The Armies of the Night in 1968.

New Journalists wrote subjective, long-form journalism by employing dialogue, characterization, figurative language, and stylistic and formal experimentation traditionally associated with novels and short stories.

Mailer arrives in Los Angeles in 1960 to report on the Democratic convention which would nominate John F. Kennedy who would go on to defeat Republican Richard M. Nixon.

The convention, he recalls, was largely devoid of drama owing to his domination of the primary elections, and yet its importance could not be overstated because "America was in danger of drifting into a profound decline," the result of Cold War paranoia, conformity, and encroaching totalitarianism.

[4] In Section 1, Mailer begins with his sense that the Democratic delegates and party bosses who had come to Los Angeles were in a state of panic because they were about to nominate a man they did not altogether understand.

[5] They understand that Kennedy's money and organization have enabled him to win the primaries and that his politics are conventionally liberal, and yet, Mailer writes, "the candidate for all his record, his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz".

Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and 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.

[8] Mailer develops one of the two metaphors in his title: "the spirit of the supermarket, that homogeneous extension of stainless surfaces and psychoanalyzed people, packaged commodities and ranch homes, interchangeable, geographically unrecognizable, that essence of a new postwar SuperAmerica is found nowhere so perfectly as in Los Angeles' ubiquitous acres".

Mailer begins Section 3 with the crucial insight: "the Democrats were going to nominate a man who [was] going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.

[7] He identifies the greatest threat facing the nation as Cold War conformity and totalitarianism, but the saving grace for American society might be its ability to resist social and cultural homogenization because "America was the land where people still believed in heroes" like John F.

[10] However, the conformity of the Cold War years had forced that river back underground while "the myth continued to flow, fed by television and the film".

The televised event reinforced his understanding of the kind of people who typically associated with the Republican Party, and he lists a wide variety of types.

[15] Mailer constructs Kennedy and Nixon as polar opposites and anticipates that: "One would have an inkling at last if the desire of America was for drama or stability, for adventure or monotony".

Mailer's reporting was highly intuitive and imaginative, and he recreates his subjective reactions to events, which have their own phenomenal reality, making those the major focus of his account.

[20] Mailer tended to frame his arguments in terms of dichotomies, and in this essay he associates Kennedy with drama and adventure, Richard Nixon with monotony and stability, yet he senses the "power of each man to radiate his appeal into some fundamental depths of the American character".

Like another American Romantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mailer's essayistic arrangement frequently digresses as he muses on the symbolic meanings of events.

To populate his narrative, Mailer sketches a series of revealing personality profiles of well-known public figures such as Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson, and Eleanor Roosevelt, focusing on their voices, movements, and facial expressions.

[24] Lennon recounts that Mailer felt "Bored and depressed by the knee-jerk patriotism and family pieties of the tranquilized Eisenhower era".