 | This is the user sandbox of Kamyers. A user sandbox is a subpage of the user's user page. It serves as a testing spot and page development space for the user and is not an encyclopedia article. Create or edit your own sandbox here. |
 | This page, “sandbox,” is currently Under Construction. It was last revised by the editor Kamyers on 2025-03-12. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have the page completed soon. If you have a question or comment, please post a discussion thread. (Find out how to remove this banner.) |
This essay first appeared in Commentary magazine in 1967
In the late 50's, Norman Mailer's Reputation still stood on The Naked and the Dead (1948), neither of his subsequent efforts, Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1055), having quite convinced Mailer or anyone else that he was the major novelist he insisted he could become. By his own later account, his head was leaden with seconal, benzedrene, and marijuana: a sense of what he himself has termed passivity, stupidity, and dissipation threatened to overcome him. Only gradually, after returning to New York from Paris and giving up drugs and cigarettes, did he begin to feel that he could write once again. Then, in 1957, Mailer produced “The White Negro,” an essay which restored his faith in his literary future and presaged the forms and directions that it would take.