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{{DISPLAYTITLE:The Beatster, the White Negro, and the Evolution of the Hipster in ''Fight Club''}}
{{DISPLAYTITLE:The Beatster, the White Negro, and the Evolution of the Hipster in ''Fight Club''}}
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{{byline|last=Mosser|first=Jason|abstract=Out of the chaos and destruction of World War II emerged the hipster, a figure variously represented in works such as John Clellon Holmes’, ''Go'', which is about the group of figures at the center of the Beat Generation: Lawrence Lipton’s ''The Holy Barbarians'', a sociological study of the lives of some West Coast hipsters; and Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” (1957), in which he introduced his titular existential anti-hero. The White Negro is a cultural icon who may or may not have existed in reality as Mailer described him: was he a true composite of certain marginalized characters, or was he merely a projection of Mailer’s own racial and sexual fantasies about African-Americans and their relation to white, middle-class intellectuals like himself. The Beatster was a teahead or junkie, jazz musician or aficionado, artist or intellectual, sexual adventurer or deviant, and Buddhist or spiritual seeker, in many ways mirroring Mailer’s hipster but without the violence.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr10moss}}
 
{{abstract|Out of the chaos and destruction of World War II emerged the hipster, a figure variously represented in works such as John Clellon Holmes’, ''Go'', which is about the group of figures at the center of the Beat Generation: Lawrence Lipton’s ''The Holy Barbarians'', a sociological study of the lives of some West Coast hipsters; and Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” (1957), in which he introduced his titular existential anti-hero. The White Negro is a cultural icon who may or may not have existed in reality as Mailer described him: was he a true composite of certain marginalized characters, or was he merely a projection of Mailer’s own racial and sexual fantasies about African-Americans and their relation to white, middle-class intellectuals like himself. The Beatster was a teahead or junkie, jazz musician or aficionado, artist or intellectual, sexual adventurer or deviant, and Buddhist or spiritual seeker, in many ways mirroring Mailer’s hipster but without the violence.}}
 


Out of the chaos and destruction of World War II emerged the hipster, a figure variously represented in works such as John Clellon Holmes’ ''roman à clef'', ''Go'' (1952) about the group of figures at the center of the Beat Generation: Lawrence Lipton’s ''The Holy Barbarians'' (1959), a sociological study of the lives of some West Coast hipsters; and Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” (1957), in which he introduced his titular existential anti-hero. In ''Hip: The History'', John Leland traces the origins of Hip to the colonial era when through the institution of slavery Africans and Europeans first began to engage one another, the Africans becoming more Europeanized as the Europeans became more Africanized. Leland identifies as other proto-hipster scenes the New England Transcendentalists, the Lost Generation, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Greenwich Village Bohemians, all superseded by the bi-coastal hipster of the 1940s-60s best exemplified by those cats we call the Beat Generation for which, as Michael Lennon states in his recent biography of Mailer (2013), “The White Negro” became the philosophical foundation as Kerouac’s ''On the Road'' (1957) represented the fictional and Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) the poetic.{{sfn|Lennon|2013|p=239}}
Out of the chaos and destruction of World War II emerged the hipster, a figure variously represented in works such as John Clellon Holmes’ ''roman à clef'', ''Go'' (1952) about the group of figures at the center of the Beat Generation: Lawrence Lipton’s ''The Holy Barbarians'' (1959), a sociological study of the lives of some West Coast hipsters; and Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” (1957), in which he introduced his titular existential anti-hero. In ''Hip: The History'', John Leland traces the origins of Hip to the colonial era when through the institution of slavery Africans and Europeans first began to engage one another, the Africans becoming more Europeanized as the Europeans became more Africanized. Leland identifies as other proto-hipster scenes the New England Transcendentalists, the Lost Generation, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Greenwich Village Bohemians, all superseded by the bi-coastal hipster of the 1940s-60s best exemplified by those cats we call the Beat Generation for which, as Michael Lennon states in his recent biography of Mailer (2013), “The White Negro” became the philosophical foundation as Kerouac’s ''On the Road'' (1957) represented the fictional and Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) the poetic.{{sfn|Lennon|2013|p=239}}
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