Through the Quintessential Divide

Mailer’s Response to Race Theory

Abstract

This essay examines Mailer’s unpublished drafts of the following: a 1952 draft of his short story, “The Dead Gook”; a 1956 draft of his short story, “The Man Who Studied Yoga,” and probingly explores the meanings and response to militant Black nationalism in “Looking For Meat and Potatoes.” Areas of exploration include the potential axis of criticism from beyond about Mailer’s evocations of race, the knowledge(s) and social spheres of minorities during the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, and the political expressions of centrism and mysticism versus those of the Beat Generation, minority writers in the postmodern Era, and socialist realism that prefigured ethnic immigrants to the United States.