Norman Mailer's Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969

J. Michael Lennon's edition of 75 Mailer letters, 1963–1969, tracing the conception, serial composition, book publication, and reception of An American Dream. Published by Sligo Press in 2004 with an introduction, annotations, and four appendices; drawn from the Mailer Archive with Mailer's own corrections of fact and interpretation.

Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969, edited by J. Michael Lennon (Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press, 2004), gathers 75 of Mailer’s letters spanning the conception, serial composition, book publication, and reception of An American Dream. Drawn from the Norman Mailer Papers at the Harry Ransom Center and edited with Mailer’s own corrections of fact and interpretation, the collection is the single richest documentary record of how Mailer worked under the pressure of writing a novel in eight monthly ten-thousand-word installments for Esquire — “the perils of Pauline,” as he put it — after selling the unwritten book to Dial and Dell for an unprecedented advance.

The earliest letter (18 September 1963, to the Chilean ambassador Sergio Gutiérrez-Olivos) is the first in which Mailer mentions his plan to go to New England to begin the novel; the run then tracks the deal, the month-by-month grind of the serial, the book’s March 1965 Dial Press publication, and its critical reception, closing with a 1969 note to Whit Burnett, who had published Mailer’s first story in 1941. Recurring correspondents include his Japanese translator Eiichi Yamanishi, his British editor Diana Athill at Andre Deutsch, the critic Diana Trilling, the novelists Don Carpenter and Fig Gwaltney, and his close friend Mickey Knox.

In Lennon’s introduction the book also makes a critical claim: that with An American Dream Mailer for the first time invested a major fictional character — Stephen Rojack — with his own deepest concerns and theological beliefs, “a belief in an heroic but limited God locked in struggle with a powerful, wily Devil.” The original volume contained, besides the letters, a list of illustrations, an index, and four appendices: Mailer’s key publications, 1948–2003; a selected An American Dream bibliography; a timeline of events, 1962–1966; and the Esquire/Dial word-count comparison. Much of that apparatus is reproduced in the digital An American Dream Expanded edition (Lucas et al., Middle Georgia State University, 2019), which is this project’s working source for the corpus.

This project ingests the collection letter by letter: each letter is a Letter page (type: letter, in wiki/letters/) of its own, dated to composition and linked here, with a rights-cleared full-text page (reproduced by permission of the editor). All letters in the collection are now built and linked below. Per the editorial precedent adopted for this collection, the individual letters carry no legacy-id (they are not separately numbered in the print Works and Days); the Lennon number 04.7 belongs to the collection as a whole.

The letters

Related pages

• An American Dream | reception and reviews | The Presidential Papers
• J. Michael Lennon | Sligo Press | Eiichi Yamanishi | Diana Trilling | Mickey Knox

First published: 2004
Form: collection
Lennon & Lennon: 04.7
Cite as: /works/2004-letters-on-an-american-dream
Last updated: 2026-06-08