The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster is a 9,000-word essay by Norman Mailer that connects the "psychic havoc" wrought by the Holocaust and atomic bomb to the aftermath of slavery in America in the figuration of the Hipster, or the "white negro".[1] The essay is a call to abandon Eisenhower liberalism and a numbing culture of conformity and psychoanalysis in favor of the rebelliousness, personal violence and emancipating sexuality that Mailer associates with marginalized black culture.[2]The White Negro was first published in the 1957 special issue of Dissent, before being published separately by City Lights.[3] Mailer's essay was controversial upon its release and received a mixed reception, winning praise, for example, from Eldridge Cleaver[citation needed] and criticism from James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Allen Ginsberg. Baldwin, in particular, heavily criticized the work, asserting that it perpetuated the notorious "myth of the sexuality of Negros" and stating that it was beneath Mailer's talents.[4] The work remains his most famous and most reprinted essay[5] and it established Mailer's reputation as a "philosopher of hip".[6][7]
The origins of The White Negro (WN) date from the mid-1950s. According to the biography of Carl Rollyson, Mailer wanted to tap into the energy of the Beat Generation and the changes of consciousness members such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac inspired.[8] Mailer used "Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers", his column in The Village Voice, to develop and explore his philosophy of "Hip", or "American existentialism".[9] In the psychopathic character Marion Faye from his 1955 novel The Deer Park Mailer considered he had created a prototypical Hipster.[10][11] Mailer also tapped into the contemporary cultural dialogue about black male sexuality and, with the prompting of Lyle Stuart, published four paragraphs about black male super-sexuality in the Independent.[12] Mailer's outrageous sentiment was not well received (notable critics included William Faulkner, Eleanor Roosevelt, and W. E. B. Du Bois) but the debate prompted him to begin work on WN.[13][14]
Lipton's Journal, Mailer's unpublished 105,000-word diary of self-analysis (written over four months while experimenting with marijuana), also contributed to the essay's genesis.[15] The journal documents "his insights [that] challenge some of the dominant ideas of Western thought", specifically the dualisms that Mailer saw within every individual, like that of the saint and the psychopath.[16] Mailer had planned to use the insights from Lipton's Journal in a series of novels which he ultimately never wrote, but he did incorporate some ideas from the journal into WN.[7] Mailer summarizes these ideas in one of the journal's last entries:
Generally speaking we have come to the point in history—in this country anyway—where the middle class and upper middle class is composed primarily of the neurotic-conformists, and the saint-psychos are found in some of the activities of the working class (as opposed to the working class itself), in the Negro people, in Bohemians, in the illiterates, among the reactionaries, a few of the radicals, some of the prison population, and of course in the mass communication media.[14]
Other influences on both Lipton's Journal and The White Negro include the psycho-sexual theories of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the writings of Karl Marx, and the music of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and other bebop jazz artists.[17] Dearborn writes that Mailer saw these great men of jazz as quintessential figures of Hip: Miles Davis, for example, "was the avatar of Hip, and, with his lean, chiseled good looks and his ultra cool manner he was distinctly a sex symbol as well, appealing to white women as well as black".[18] These elements provided the background for Mailer's new-found understanding of social reality.[19]
Synopsis
The White Negro is a 9,000-word essay divided into six sections of varying lengths.[20]
In Section 1, Mailer argues that the twin horrors of the atom bomb and the concentration camps have wrought "psychic havoc" by subjecting individual human lives to the calculus of the state machine. The collective practices of Western progress seem to render life and death meaningless for the individual who is compelled to join the numbed masses in a "collective failure of nerve".[21] Courage only seems to be present in marginalized, isolated people who can stand in opposition to these practices.[22]
The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.
—§2, p. 341
Section 2 proposes that the marginalized figure — "the American existentialist" — lives with the knowledge of quick death, the possibility of state violence, the compulsory need to conform, and the sublimation of baser desires. He knows that the only answer is to accept these conditions, divorce himself from the bored sickness of society, and seek the "rebellious imperatives of the self". Mailer presents a dichotomy: one path leads to a quiet prison of the mind and body, that is, to boredom, sickness, and desperation, while the other leads to "new kinds of victories [that] increase one's power for new kinds of perception". Either one is a rebel — the Hip, the psychopath — or, tempted by the promise of success, one conforms to "the totalitarian tissues of an American society", and becomes Square.[22] Because he has lived on the margins of society, for Mailer the American Negro is the model for the Hipster: someone living for the primitive present and the pleasures of the body.[23] Mailer links this proposition with jazz and its appeal to the sensual, the improvisational, and the immediate, in other words, to what Mailer calls the "burning consciousness of the present" felt by the existentialist, the bullfighter, and the Hipster alike.[24] In summary, one can "remain in life only by engaging death".[25]
For Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal is still beyond the civilized man.
—§3, p. 343
Section 3 defines the Hipster further as a "philosophical psychopath" interested in codifying, like Hemingway,[26] the "dangerous imperatives" that define his experience. He is a contradiction, possessing a "narcissistic detachment" from his own "unreasoning drive" allowing him to shift his attention from immediate gratification to "future power".[27] Psychopaths, Mailer continues, "are trying to create a new nervous system for themselves" one that distinguishes itself from the "inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past". Yet the stable middle-class values necessary to achieve this via sublimation "have been virtually destroyed in our time".[28] Psychoanalysis cannot provide the answer sought by the overstretched nervous system. It is a practice which only succeeds in "tranquilizing" a patient's most interesting qualities: "The patient is indeed not so much altered as worn out—less bad, less good, less bright, less willful, less destructive, less creative".[28] The nervous system is remade, Mailer contends, by trying to "live the infantile fantasy", in which the psychopath traces the source of his creation in an atavistic quest to give voice and action to infantile, or forbidden, desires.[29] In this "morality of the bottom", then, the psychopath finds the courage to act free of the "old crippling habit" that has anesthetized him.[30] Now, he can purge his violence, even through murder, but what he really seeks is physical love as a "sexual outlaw" in the form of an orgasm more "apocalyptic than the one which preceded it".[31]
Section 3 ends with an introduction to the language of Hip, a "special language" that "cannot be taught" because it is based on a shared experience of "elation and exhaustion" and the dynamic movements of man as a "vector in a network of forces" rather than "as a static character in a crystalized field".[32]
Section 4 develops this language further, linking the language to movement and the search for the "unachievable whisper of mystery within the sex, the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm."[33]
Truth is no more nor less than what one feels at each instant in the perpetual climax of the present.
—§5, p. 354
Section 5 posits that the Hip judgement of character is "perpetually ambivalent and dynamic".[34] Mailer suggests, developing the existential reality of the Hipster further, that men are character as well as context, giving way to "an absolute relativity where there are no truths other than the isolated truths of what each observer feels at each instant of his existence".[35] The consequence of this realization is liberation from the "Super-Ego of society". The moral imperative, then, centers in the individual who acts in accordance with his desires, not as the group would have him behave: "The nihilism of Hip proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed, and the affirmation implicit in the proposal is that man would then prove to be more creative than murderous and so would not destroy himself".[35] The idea is that even individual acts of violence — because they come from courage to act — prove more desirable than any collective state violence, as the former would be more genuine, creative, and cathartic.[36] A "psychically armed rebellion", Mailer continues, is necessary to free everyone: "A time of violence, new hysteria, confusion and rebellion will then be likely to replace the time of conformity".[37] This potentially violent rebellion would be preferable to the "murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state".[38]
Finally, in Section 6, Mailer speculates whether "the last war of them all" will be between factions of socially polar communities or through despair at the current crisis of capitalism. Perhaps, Mailer ends, we still have something to learn from Marx.[39]
Analysis
True to his thesis in "First Advertisement for Myself" (from his 1959 collection of essays), Mailer can be seen to be attempting "a revolution in the consciousness of our time" by challenging the thoughts and practices that sanitized American life after World War II.[40] In his biography on Mailer, J. Michael Lennon suggests that The White Negro was Mailer's attempt to "will into being an army of hipster revolutionaries who could bring about an urban utopia".[41] In a response to Jean Malaquais, who had criticized WN in the magazine Dissent, Mailer wrote: "the removal therefore of all social restraints while it would open us to an era of incomparable individual violence would still spare us the collective violence of rational totalitarian liquidations . . . and would — and here is the difference — by expending the violence directly, open the possibility of working with that human creativity which is violence's opposite".[42] While WN embraces violence, it makes a distinction between violence by the state and individual violence: the former leads to concentration camps and pogroms, while the latter can lead to freedom.[43] For Mailer, writes Maggie McKinley, violence seems to be an essential part of the masculinity of the Hipster, helping to oppose collectivizing and numbing social forces.[44] In a 1957 letter to a publicly critical Malaquais, Mailer clarified his beliefs that: (1) barbarism could be an alternative to totalitarianism, and (2) that human energy should not be sublimated at the expense of the individual.[45]
Both Jean Malaquais and Ned Polsky accused Mailer of romanticizing violence, and Laura Adams highlighted the consequences of Mailer's testing his "violence as catharsis" theory in real life when he nearly killed his second wife Adele by stabbing her twice with a penknife.[46] Polsky stated that Mailer was well aware of the drawbacks in the life of a hipster, but because of his fascination with them, Mailer romanticized away the consequences. For Polsky the hipster wasn't as sexually liberated as Mailer tried to make him seem: "Mailer confuses the life of action with the life of acting out".[47] Because the hipster is crippled psychologically, he is also crippled sexually. Polsky dismissed Mailer's hipster and upheld psychoanalysis as a greater benefit to sexual health.[47]
Although The White Negro takes as its subject a subcultural phenomenon, it represents a localized synthesis of Marx and Freud, and thus presages the New Left movement and the birth of the counterculture in the United States.[citation needed] Rollyson suggests that Mailer dismissed a Freudian approach to psychology that called for the adjustment of the individual to societal norms and instead espoused Wilhem Reich's emphasis on sexual energy and orgasm.[8] Christopher Brookeman created a possible motivation for Mailer through his idea of Marxism combined with a kind of "Reichian Freudianism" to find solutions "in the better orgasm" which in turn would allow for the rise of one's "full instinctual potential".[48] Reich inspired Mailer as one of the few intellectuals or writers in general who had deeply explored the power, primacy and potential of the male orgasm. The White Negro is explicitly influenced by Reich in two primary ways: the exaltation of male sexual eruption and the related theme of the virile, iconoclastic male hipster casting off societal rules and impositions to be led instead by his sex, his body and his instincts. These provide a balm and shield against all physical and mental ailments and diseases, including cancer.[49] Mailer makes a comparison of the hipster hero with other outliers in society such as the Negro, the lover and the psychopath.[50] He commends the social outliers' ability to live in a "burning" present, one with a continuous awareness of their closeness to death.[50] Likewise, Mailer's admiration for Linder's description of the psychopath in Rebel without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of the Criminal Psychopath influenced his formulation of the drama of psychopath as being "one that, in the end, centers on his quest for love".[51] This quest for love — or "the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it" — allows the psychopath to become "an embodiment of the extreme contradictions of society which formed his character".[51]
Mailer presents a theme of dualistic "opposed extremes" in his characterization of the hipster and the square.[52]Tony Tanner believes that Mailer was excited by the twentieth century's "tendency to reduce all of life to its ultimate alternatives", noting the value that Mailer places on opposite couplings.[53]The White Negro demonstrates Mailer's fondness for duality when he ponders if "the last war of them all will be between the blacks and the whites, or between the women and the men, or between the beautiful and the ugly", again listing some of his favorite alternatives.[38] Similarly, Ihab Hassan shows this duality by using the hipster's face as that of an "alienated" hero covered by a twisted mask in order to hide the look of disgust towards one's own experiences and encounters while out in "search of kicks".[54]
Tracy Dahlby argues that Mailer's hipster is still a necessity in the fight against conformity by consumption.[55] According to Mailer, this fight against conformity will liberate the "squares".[56] Focusing on a post-9/11 world similar to the years after World War II, Dahlby points to the new age of technology, social media, and increased consumption as symptomatic of a mindless society. In a world that exposes people to unspeakable violence and fear through social media, desensitized news coverage, and radical conspiracy theories, the paucity of existential hipsters puts people at risk of failing to achieve a fulfilling life.[57]
Publication
Though the bulk of the content of The White Negro had appeared in piecemeal fashion in Mailer's regular columns in the Village Voice,[9] the essay in its entirety first appeared in a special issue of Dissent in 1957.[58] It triggered a "great orgasm debate" in subsequent issues, touching on the zeitgeist of the fifties and the effects of psychoanalysis in general. Sorin observes that the board of Dissent published the essay apparently without debate, temporarily tripling the periodical's subscriptions.[58] It was only later, relates then-editor Irving Howe, that they realized publishing the essay as-written was "unprincipled".[59] Despite the initial controversy, Lennon notes, WN became the most reprinted essay of an era.[60] It was reprinted with rebuttals from Ned Polsky and Jean Malaquais, followed by Mailer's response, as "Reflections on Hip", in his 1959 miscellany, Advertisements for Myself. The essay and "Reflections on Hip" were reprinted the same year in pamphlet form by City Light Press, and again by this press several times over the next 15 years.[6] Most recently it appears in Mind of an Outlaw (2014).[61] Young enthusiasts of Mailer's essay, states Lennon, carried their copies of the City Light's reprint proudly as a "trumpet of defiance" throughout an awakening nation.[41]
Reception
Reception to The White Negro was mixed, and the essay has been controversial since its publication. It has, according to J. Michael Lennon, been "the most discussed American essay in the quarter century after World War II".[60] According to Tracy Dahlby, Mailer's views were a hot topic in 1957 and many of his critics accused him of accepting violence as a "form of existential expression".[56]
In a letter to Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison called the essay "the same old primitivism crap in a new package".[9] Similarly, Allen Ginsberg termed the essay "very square" and recalled that Jack Kerouac thought Mailer an "intellectual fool". Both considered The White Negro a "macho folly" that could not be reconciled with the "tenderheartedness" of the Beat perspective.[62] Ginsberg saw no Dostoyevskian hero in Mailer's violent Hipster.
Several prominent critics, such as James Baldwin, chided Mailer publicly for their perception that, with The White Negro, he was openly aping lesser writers such as Jack Kerouac in order to jump on the bandwagon of moody, meandering, faux-thrill-seeking Beatniks.[9] Baldwin, in his essay "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" for Esquire (May 1961) called The White Negro "impenetrable", and wondered how Mailer, a writer that he saw as brilliant and talented, could write an essay that was so beneath him.[4] For Baldwin, Mailer's essay simply perpetuated the "myth of the sexuality of Negros" while attempting to sell white people their own innocence and purity.[63] Baldwin showed great respect for Mailer's talent, but aligned The White Negro with other distractions — like running for mayor of NYC — that Baldwin saw as beneath Mailer and distracted him from his real responsibility as a writer.[64]
Kate Millett's view of The White Negro criticized Mailer of making a virtue of violence. In her book Sexual Politics, she makes the claim that Mailer finds that violence is something that he has fallen in love with as a personal and sexual style.[65] She states that for Mailer, "a rapist is only rapist to a square" and that "rape is a part of life". Millett goes on to criticize Mailer of matching the aesthetic of Hip to harmful masculine pride.[65] Additionally, Millett accuses WN of celebrating and romanticizing stereotypes about Black hyper-sexuality.
Similarly, author and intellectual Lorraine Hansberry joined Baldwin in rejecting the same message. She argued WN also excuses and idealizes society's denigrating and ostracizing Black people to further Mailer's agenda of repackaging White racism as Black iconoclasm.[66] While Mailer seemed to have a sense of the historical importance of the late 1950s, explains Ginsberg, he was being an "apocalyptic goof" with his naive Hipster figuration that Kerouac saw as "well intentioned but poisonous, in the sense that it encouraged an image of violence".[67]
James Arthur Baldwin was an American writer and civil rights activist. He garnered acclaim for his work across several forms, including essays, novels, plays, and poems. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953; in 2005, Time magazine included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels released since the year of the Time's first publication in 1923. His first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, was published in 1955.
Nachem Malech Mailer, known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, and filmmaker. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II.
The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History is a nonfiction novel recounting the October 1967 March on the Pentagon written by Norman Mailer and published by New American Library in 1968. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction and the National Book Award in category Arts and Letters. Mailer's unique rendition of the non-fiction novel was perhaps his most successful example of new journalism, and received the most critical attention. In Cold Blood (1965) by Truman Capote and Hell's Angels (1966) by Hunter S. Thompson had already been published, and three months later Tom Wolfe would contribute The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).
Another Country is a 1962 novel by James Baldwin. The novel is primarily set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France in the late 1950s. It portrayed many themes that were taboo at the time of its release, including bisexuality, interracial couples and extramarital affairs.
An American Dream is a 1965 novel by American author Norman Mailer. It was published by Dial Press. Mailer wrote it in serialized form for Esquire, consciously attempting to resurrect the methodology used by Charles Dickens and other earlier novelists, with Mailer writing each chapter against monthly deadlines. The book is written in a poetic style heavy with metaphor that creates unique and hypnotising narrative and dialogue. The novel's action takes place over 32 hours in the life of its protagonist Stephen Rojack. Rojack is a decorated war-hero, former congressman, talk-show host, and university professor. He is depicted as the metaphorical embodiment of the American Dream.
Hip is a slang for fashionably current and in the know. To be hip is to have "an attitude, a stance" in opposition to the "unfree world", or to what is square or prude. Being hip is also about being informed about the latest ideas, styles, and developments.
Sexual Politics is the debut book by American writer and activist Kate Millett, based on her PhD dissertation at Columbia University. It was published in 1970 by Doubleday. It is regarded as a classic of feminism and one of radical feminism's key texts, a formative piece in shaping the intentions of the second-wave feminist movement. In Sexual Politics, an explicit focus is placed on male dominance throughout prominent 20th century art and literature. According to Millett, western literature reflects patriarchal constructions and the heteronormativity of society. She argues that men have established power over women, but that this power is the result of social constructs rather than innate or biological qualities.
The terms hipster or hepcat, as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados of jump blues and jazz, in particular bebop, which became popular in the early 1940s. The hipster subculture adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following features: Conk hairstyles, loose fitting suits with loud colors, jive talk slang, use of tobacco, cannabis, and recreational drugs, relaxed attitude, love for Jazz or Jump blues music, and styles of swing dancing especially Lindy hop.
According to lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, the terms hipster and hippie derive from the word hip and the synonym hep, whose origins are disputed. The words hip and hep first surfaced in slang around the beginning of the 20th century and spread quickly, making their first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1904. At the time, the words were used to mean "aware" and "in the know". In the late 1960s, African language scholar David Dalby popularized the idea that words used in American slang could be traced back to West Africa. He claimed that hipi was the source for both hip and hep. Sheidlower, however, disputes Dalby's assertion that the term hip comes from Wolof origins.
Why Are We In Vietnam? (WWVN) is a 1967 novel by the American author Norman Mailer. It focuses on a hunting trip to the Brooks Range in Alaska where a young man is brought by his father, a wealthy businessman who works for a company that makes cigarette filters and is obsessed with killing a grizzly bear. As the novel progresses, the protagonist is increasingly disillusioned that his father resorts to hunting tactics that seem dishonest and weak, including the use of a helicopter and taking credit for killing a bear. At the end of the novel, the protagonist tells the reader that he is soon going to serve in the Vietnam War as a soldier.
Romantic racism is a form of racism in which members of a dominant group project their fantasies onto members of oppressed groups. Scholarship has found this view, for example, in Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, and other Beatnik authors of the 1950s of romantic racism. They maintain that the dominant mainstream culture of the 1950s in the United States stressed conformity and held up middle-class suburban families as the cultural ideal, and that it was indifferent to art and literature, upheld racial segregation, and despised or ignored black achievements, such as jazz. Those, like the novelist Norman Mailer, who felt limited by or alienated from mainstream culture, sought out influences from other cultures as a form of rebellion. This romanticization is based in stereotypes created by the dominant group.
Advertisements for Myself is an omnibus collection of fiction, essays, verse, and fragments by Norman Mailer, with autobiographical commentaries that he calls "advertisements." Advertisements was published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1959 after Mailer secured his reputation with The Naked and the Dead, then endured setbacks with the less-enthusiastic reception of Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955). Advertisements, though chaotic, unapologetically defiant, and often funny, marks the beginning of Mailer's mature style.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 is a non-fiction novel written by Norman Mailer which covers the Republican and Democratic national party political conventions of 1968 and the anti-Vietnam War protests surrounding them. It was published in 1968 by the World Publishing Company.
"The Time of Her Time" is a 1959 short story written by Norman Mailer, first appearing in his miscellany Advertisements for Myself. The story depicts macho Irish Catholic bullfighting instructor Sergius O'Shaugnessy and his sexual conquest of a young, middle-class Jewish college girl, Denise Gondelman. The short story was adapted to film in 2000 by Francis Delia. On multiple occasions, Mailer has touted "The Time of Her Time" as "the godfather of Lolita."
"Superman Comes to the Supermarket" is an essay by the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer about the 1960 Democratic convention. Originally published in Esquire as "Superman Comes to the Supermart," this essay was Mailer's initial foray into political journalism. It characterizes John F. Kennedy as a potential "existential hero" who could revitalize the US after eight years under Dwight D. Eisenhower to rediscover its lost imagination. "Superman" further develops and emphasizes Mailer's concern with the importance of the individual's will and creativity that must challenge conformity and obedience in American life to fully realize a genuine life. With "Superman", Mailer extends New Journalism by taking an active role in the narrative, which would characterize much of his subsequent journalistic style and lead to his Pulitzer Prize for The Armies of the Night in 1968.
During a November 1960 party celebrating his mayoral candidacy, American public intellectual Norman Mailer twice stabbed his wife Adele Morales with a pen-knife in a drunken altercation, nearly taking her life. The incident, though by many accounts swept under the rug by Mailer and his associates, had a lasting impact on his public and critical legacy and persona.
The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer is a 1967 anthology of short stories by Norman Mailer. It is grouped into eight thematic sections and contains nineteen stories, many appearing in one of Mailer's miscellanies; thirteen were published in periodicals or other anthologies before appearing in this collection. The collection was reprinted in hardcover in 1980 and some of the stories were reprinted in other volumes.
"The Man Who Studied Yoga", a novella by Norman Mailer written in 1952, was first published in the 1956 collection New Short Novels 2 then later in Mailer's 1959 miscellany Advertisements for Myself (AFM). It is a tale of a "writer manqué", or a writer who fails to write, reflecting some of Mailer's own anxiety in the 1950s as he tries to reinvent himself.
This Norman Mailer bibliography lists major books by and about Mailer, an American novelist, new journalist, essayist, public intellectual, filmmaker, and biographer. Over a fifty-nine-year period, Mailer won two Pulitzer Prizes and had eleven books spend a total of 160 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Mailer's output included fiction, non-fiction, poems and essays. Biographer J. Michael Lennon called Mailer the chronicler of the American Century, and a talent whose career has "been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, improvisational, public, productive, lengthy and misunderstood".
The Faith of Graffiti is a 1974 essay by American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer about New York City's graffiti artists. Mailer's essay appeared in a shorter form in Esquire and as a book with 81 photographs by Jon Naar and design by Mervyn Kurlansky. Through interviews, exploration, and analyses, the essay explores the political and artistic implications of graffiti. The essay was controversial at the time of publication because of its attempt to validate graffiti as an art form by linking it with great artists of the past. Some critics also said Mailer was using the essay as a platform to express his political grievances. Faith grew out of Mailer's existential philosophy of the hip, in which a Hipster is guided by his instincts regardless of consequences or perception, and upholds graffiti as a subversive and healthy check on the status quo. Like several of his other non-fiction narratives, Mailer continued his use of new journalism techniques, adopting a persona, the A-I or "Aesthetic Investigator", to provide both an objective distance from the topic and to engender the text with the creative and critical eye of the novelist.
Grimsted, David (September 1986). "The Jekyll-Hyde Complex in Studies of American Popular Culture". Reviews in American History. 14 (3): 428–435. doi:10.2307/2702620. JSTOR2702620.
—; Lennon, Donna Pedro (2018). Lucas, Gerald R. (ed.). Norman Mailer: Works and Days (Revised and Expandeded.). Atlanta: Norman Mailer Society. ISBN9781732651906. Retrieved 2018-10-13.
McKinley, Maggie (2017). Understanding Norman Mailer. Understanding Contemporary American Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN978-1611178050.
Menand, Louis (January 5, 2009). "It Took a Village". The New Yorker. Critic at Large. pp.36–45. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
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