An American Dream Expanded/There’s Hope in Mailer: Difference between revisions

== Cult of the Hipster ==

It was Mailer who developed the cult of the Hipster--the truly modern American who lets the bleary world go by doing whatever it bloody well likes, because nothing it does can upset the Hipsters' inexhaustible Cool. It isn't that Mailer's characters are without passion: on the contrary they tend to be so highly strung that no matter how gently you stroke them, they emit twangy sharp tones. It is that the workaday pressures of civilization don't affect them. They aren't influenced very much by tradition; or by the venerable arguments for continence and moderation; or by the recognition that other people's existences, and hopes, abut against our own ambitions and self-concern.