The Mailer Review/Volume 11, 2017/On Compiling a Selective Bibliography on “The White Negro”: Difference between revisions

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{{start|2017 marked the sixty-year anniversary}} of the publication of Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” announcing the emergence of his new existential hero, the “philosophical psychopath,” a Nietzschean ''ubermensch'' who re-evaluated all traditional American values to create his own system. Widely read and cited since the time of its initial publication in ''Dissent'',{{Sfn|Mailer|1957}} the essay represents Mailer’s stated desire to lead a “revolution in the consciousness of our time.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=17}} Its impact has prompted John {{harvtxt|Leland|2004}} to cite the essay in his book ''Hip: The History'' as central to that history. Beat Generation chronicler John Clellon Holmes called Mailer’s countercultural, philosophical foray into the nature of Hip and the hipster “a pioneer exploration of this New Consciousness, a document fully as important to this age as ''[[w:Notes from Underground|Notes from Underground]]'' was to the Europe of its time.”{{sfn|Holmes|1988|p=87}} At the same time, his friend and colleague James {{harvtxt|Baldwin|1961}} 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 called his fellow author’s hipness into serious question. From other contemporaries the essay provoked more strongly negative responses. Norman {{harvtxt|Podhoretz|1958}} lumped Mailer together with the Beats as “Know-Nothing Bohemians” and castigated him for his suggestion that violence represented a legitimate response to the instinctual repression of his age, while Paul O’Neil entertained readers of ''Life'' magazine by ridiculing Mailer and the Beats as devotees of “the cult of the Pariah,”{{sfn|O’Neil|1959|p=115}} a gang of wannabe posers. Nevertheless, as the responses of African-American and Gender Studies critics cited in this bibliography attest, “The White Negro” continues to assert its relevance and to antagonize its detractors.