Hipster

The "hipster" is Mailer's name, in "The White Negro" (1957), for a postwar American existential type: the white outsider who, in a totalitarian and atomic age, chooses the dangerous, present-tense freedom Mailer associated with the marginalized Black American.

Origin

Mailer set out the figure of the hipster in “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” (57.1), published in Dissent in the summer of 1957 and grown out of his 1954–55 “Lipton’s” journal. The hipster, as Mailer drew him, is a “philosophical psychopath” who lives for the immediate present, treats violence and risk as routes to growth, and rejects the deadening “totalitarian” conformity of the Cold War social order.

Evolution

The concept first surfaces in Mailer’s late “Quickly” columns — notably the 25 April 1956 column (56.16), where Mailer answers a reader on the definition of “Hip” — and is then developed at length in The White Negro. Mailer extended and defended it in the exchange “Reflections on Hipsterism” (58.1) and gathered the whole cluster into Advertisements for Myself (59.13). The terms “Hip” and “Square” structure several of his essays of the period.

Reception

The hipster idea drew immediate and lasting controversy, most famously James Baldwin‘s rejoinder “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” (1961), which challenged Mailer’s romantic projection onto Black experience. The essay and its central figure remain Mailer’s most-cited contribution to postwar cultural debate.

Related pages

• The White Negro | Dissent
• Quickly (25 April 1956) | Reflections on Hipsterism | Advertisements for Myself | James Baldwin

Cite as: /concepts/hipster
Last updated: 2026-05-23