The White Negro

in Dissent in 1957. It was reprinted in Mailer’s collection Advertisements for Myself in 1959 and republished in pamphlet form by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books in 1959. According to Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon, “The White Negro” became the “intellectual manifesto” of the Beat Generation, just as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road represented the mythical roadmap and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl the poetic testament. “The White Negro,” Lennon said, was “the most discussed American essay in the quarter century after World War II” and “the most reprinted essay of the era.”
Since its initial publication “The White Negro” provoked controversy. Among Mailer’s contemporaries, Norman lumped him together with Beats like Kerouac and Ginsberg as “Know-Nothing Bohemians” and castigated him for his suggestion that violence, including sexual violence, represented a legitimate response to the instinctual repression of his age. Friend and colleague James wrote in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” that Mailer’s views on race were founded more on fantasy than on fact, and he dismissed his fellow author’s implicit claim to hipness. Some of the more sympathetic critics like Laura , Robert , and Robert concentrated on the essay’s existential themes; faced with the possibility of mass, impersonal death as a result concentration camps or atomic weapons on one hand, or the certainty of a “slow death by conformity” on the other, the hipster, as Mailer said, chose “to divorce [himself] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that unchartered journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self” and “to the encourage the psychopath” in himself, that his, to follow his instincts even at the risk of anti-social behavior. To Alan Petigny, the hipster presented “an alternate vision of the self…during the Age of Eisenhower.” Joe Wenke extended this theme, seeing in the hipster a figure who “reveals the romantic possibilities inherent in alienation as an existential approximation of the Adamic condition.” 
More recent criticism of the essay, viewed through the lens of Gender Studies and African-American Studies, testifies to the essay’s continuing relevance as an important cultural touchstone. Gary Marx attacked Mailer’s stereotypical construction of African-American identity. Frederick and Steve critiqued Mailer’s assumptions about gender and homosexuality as suggested by his masculine, heteronormative rhetoric, which Andrea Levine saw as Mailer’s attempt “to ‘remasculinize’ the Jewish body” in the wake of the Holocaust. Over sixty years after its initial publication, critics have continued to find Mailer’s essay relevant, if not indispensable. In Hip: The History, John frequently referenced the essay as a crucial stage in the evolution of what it means to be hip. Maggie McKinley revisited Mailer’s endorsement of violence in the essay, countering earlier criticism with the observation that “Mailer clearly believes in the power of violence, yet like [Hannah] Arendt, his writings (both fictional and nonfictional) also suggest that he sees the damage that might be wielded by violence, especially when that violence is used by governments as a mechanism of totalitarian control.” Most recently, Lauren Michelle borrowed Mailer’s title to explore the study of white Americans’ appropriation of African-American culture. 
 
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