In 1963, Mailer wrote two regular columns: one on religion called "Responses and Reactions" for Commentary and one called "Big Bite" for Esquire. Mailer also divorced from his third wife Jeanne Campbell and met Beverly Bentley who would become his fourth wife. Bentley had known Hemingway in Spain and briefly dated Miles Davis in New York before she met Mailer. Bentley and Mailer took a long car trip, notably visited an army buddy "Fig" Gwaltney in Arkansas, viewed an autopsy of a cancer victim, watched the Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson fight in Las Vegas, and spent time with the Beats in San Francisco.[4] While in San Francisco, Mailer "walked narrow ledges, testing his nerve and balance".[5] They spent several days in Georgia with Bentley's family, and returned to New York in August, with Bentley several months pregnant. Mailer officially divorced Campbell, after he and Bentley were married. These experiences, states Lennon, are reflected in An American Dream which Mailer began in September.[6]
Mailer's has similarities with Rojack: They both attended Harvard, served in World War II, had an interest in political office, and appeared on talk shows. Mailer seems to have drawn on his stabbing his second wife Adele Morales in Rojack's murdering of his wife Deborah.[7] Mailer did not deny these similarities, but stated:
Rojack is still considerably different from me — he's more elegant, more witty, more heroic, his physical strength is considerable, and at the same time he's more corrupt than me. I wanted to create a man who was larger than myself yet somewhat less successful. That way, ideally, his psychic density, if I may use a private phrase, would be equal to mine — and so I could write from within his head with comfort.[8][a]
After a cross-country trip and having little success with his "big novel", Mailer approached the editor of Esquire with an idea that would make him produce a short novel: He would write eight 10,000-word installments that would run from January to August 1964.[6] The editor agreed, and Mailer announced the novel in his last "Big Bite" column.[9]
