An American Dream sold well and spent six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, reaching number eight in April 1965.[55][56]
The reviews for An American Dream were polarized, with very few mixed. Conventional wisdom was that the novel was one of Mailer's lesser works of fiction.[57] While critics like Granville Hicks, Philip Rahv, Roger Shattuck, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Tom Wolfe called An American Dream a failure,[58] the novel has strong defenders, notably critics Leo Bersani, Richard Rhodes, Paul Pickrel, Richard Poirier, and Barry H. Leeds.[59]
Writing one of the first and most positive reviews in Life, John Aldridge states that An American Dream "transcends the conventional limits of blasphemy to expose the struggle toward psychic redemption which is the daily warfare of our hidden outlaw selves".[60] Joan Didion writing in Vogue called An American Dream "the only serious New York novel since The Great Gatsby".[61] Conrad Knickerbocker writes in The New York Times that Mailer "is one of the few really interesting writers anywhere",[62] and that An American Dream "defines the American style by presenting the most extreme of our realities — murder, love and spirit strangulated, the corruption of power and the powerful, the sacrifice of self to image, all of it mix mastered in booze and heat-and-serve sex, giving off the smell of burning rubber to the sound of sirens".[63] Since 1965, An American Dream has been defended by Mailer's critics, some of which call it one of his better novels.[49] Tony Tanner posits that a few critics likely found An American Dream to be "outrageous" due to their perception of it as a simple narrative and not as a surrealist work. Tanner hailed Leo Bersani's review of An American Dream as a "brilliant comment on the novel as a whole" because Bersani recognized the purposeful "exuberance" that Mailer used.[64]
Stanley Edgar Hyman describes An American Dream as a dreadful novel and says it's the worst that he has read in years.[65] He calls the novel pretentious and focuses his critique on what he sees as the flaws in the plot, images, and the tropes.[66]
