Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1980.
Norman Mailer’s life and work have been a celebration of the instinctive and the irrational, of the subterranean territory of the self that is expressed in dreams. His fiction, from The Naked and the Dead (1948) through The Armies of the Night (1968), can therefore be considered a series of dream books, explorations of the deep psychic content of the mind of America. Mailer has a romantic conception of the role of the artist in clarifying a nation’s vision of itself: the artist must, like Whitman, become a microcosm of the country and dream for us the collective American dream.