Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/150

Wild thought. The atom bomb may actually have kicked off hipsterism.[1] What I read about antibiotics gives me this wild speculation.



Note

  1. Mailer was perhaps the first writer to apprehend the causal links between the bomb, the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the black power movement and the sexual revolution, as delineated in “The White Negro.” The opening sentence reads: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of everyone alive these days.”