An American Dream (1960s Classics) - Softcover

Mailer, Norman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007115288 ISBN 13: 9780007115280

Publisher: Flamingo, 2001

Synopsis

A key backlist title from the highly acclaimed author of The Naked and the Dead and The Fight

War hero, ex-Congressman, a professor of ‘popular but somewhat notorious reputation’, television personality and husband of the rich and beautiful Deborah (’a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz’), Stephen Rojack lived the American Dream. But his enviable life concealed a strange tension, the constant ‘itch to jump’, and when one day he finally cracks and strangles his luscious wife, he unleashes a personality of undreamt-of ferocity.

A wanted murderer, Rojack is suddenly catapulted into an alien world of gangsters, crumbling tenements and downtown bars. Here, he meets Cherry, a small-time singer who ekes out her living in sleazy nightclubs, waiting for a break. She’s the woman Rojack falls for, dangerously, desperately, tragically…

A powerful exploration of one man’s quest for depravity, An American Dream shocked the USA on first publication in 1965 with its graphic depictions of sex and violence. One of the key works of twentieth-century American literature, the novel’s white-hot prose makes it, for many, Mailer’s finest achievement.

About this title

About the Author

Norman Mailer was born in New Jersey in 1923. He grew up in Brooklyn and entered Harvard University to study engineering when he was only sixteen. During the Second World War, Mailer served in the Philippines, an experience which formed the basis of his famous debut novel, the bestselling The Naked and the Dead. A major figure in post-war American literature, Mailer’s other works include Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, Advertisements for Myself, Armies of the Night (for which he was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award) and, most recently, The Gospel According to the Son.

From the Back Cover

"Mark Twain might have been more popular than Norman Mailer, and Hemingway more influential, but neither of these writers ever had so many thousands of people at their feet – and at their throats."
NEW YORK TIMES

'I was irritable suddenly, a sign of fatigue, the only sign of fatigue I could feel: my adrenaline had lit a new fire for the new drink. Sometime in the next hour of the next day would come a moment when I could lie down, when I would sleep – when I would try to – and then the memories of this night gone through would rise like the mutilated corpses of a battlefield, stare back at the battered face of Deborah which rose from each corpse.'

"Mailer writes like an angel – a master of small surprises that are precursors of seismic shocks."
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Edition details

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007115288
• ISBN 13: 9780007115280
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 274