How long does it take to read An American Dream?
An American Dream by Norman Mailer takes about 4 hours 47 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 47 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1965. 261 pages, about 71,775 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 59 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 47 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 59 minutes |
The page count is the median across 18 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Stephen Rojack is a decorated war hero, a former Congressman, and a certified public intellectual with his own television show. He is also married to the very rich, very beautiful, and utterly amoral Deborah Caughlin Kelly. But one night, in the prime of his existence, he hears the moon talking to him on the terrace of a fashionable New York high-rise, and it is urging him to kill himself. It is almost as a defense against that infinitely seductive voice that Rojack murders his wife.In this wild battering ram of a novel, which was originally published to vast controversy in 1965, Norman Mailer creates a character who might be a fictional precursor of the philosopher-killer he would later profile in The Executioner's Song. As Rojack runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. Sensual, horrifying, and informed by a vision that is one part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go.
Subjects: Fiction, American fiction, Sex addiction, Pathological Psychology, Interpersonal relations, Fiction, general
