"The fat dream," Arthur Bridges calls it in The Track of the Cat…. Explicitly, Arthur is talking about that American dream of conquering the American land in order to create the good, i.e., the abundantly material life—the dream indeed not just of American capitalism but of "modern" man. But Arthur is also speaking of other dreams, of the American Dream, and for the moment he is his creator's, Walter Van Tilburg Clark's, voice.

What one means by the American Dream depends, of course, upon the speaker. But in every man's definition and in every artist's realization of the Dream must appear the American land, sometimes a new Eden, sometimes something very near to Hell, sometimes mother and destroyer both, almost always a great ambiguity. Moreover, in every definition, the question of what man, or rather the white man, has to do with the mystery of nature...