Mailer's Hipster Meets Thompson's Bikers

White Negroes on Wheels

Abstract

In 1957, Norman Mailer published an essay in Dissent called “The White Negro: Some Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in which he addressed the existential crisis Americans experienced in the wake of the two great horrors of the twentieth century: the mass exterminations of concentration camps and the use of atomic weapons. The hipster, as John Leland notes, is an archetypal character who appears in many guises: the outcast, the rebel, the trickster, personified by figures such as Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, and Kurt Cobain. Kerouac, an original hipster, romanticized the lives of African-Americans, or at least the way he imagined those lives, engaging with their down-and-outness, their alienation, and their style. In On the Road, published the same year as Mailer’s essay, Kerouac recalls walking through the streets of Denver and naively “wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had to offer was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” Mailer’s hipster differs from Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s Beat prototypes in his embrace of violence as a means to summon the courage to achieve existential transcendence in the form of the “violence as catharsis which prepares growth.” Thompson seems to have followed Mailer’s admonition, the hipster’s code: “one must grow, or else pay more for remaining the same.”