Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal

The first publication of Mailer's "Lipton's" — the introspective marijuana journal he kept from December 1954 to March 1955 — edited by J. Michael Lennon, Gerald R. Lucas, and Susan Mailer (Arcade, 2024). The only previously unpublished book-length work by Mailer, it is widely read as the seedbed of "The White Negro" and the Hipster, and it prints, for the first time, the Mailer–Lindner correspondence.

Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal: 1954–1955 (Arcade, 2024)

Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal: 1954–1955. Edited by J. Michael Lennon, Gerald R. Lucas, and Susan Mailer. New York: Arcade Publishing, 25 June 2024. 408 pp. ISBN 978-1-956763-87-4.

“Lipton’s” was Mailer’s private code word for marijuana. He kept the journal between 1 December 1954 (see Days 1954) and 4 March 1955 (see Days 1955), filling some 112,000 words with, in the publisher’s description, “daily musings, as well as thoughts profound.” It is “the only work by Norman Mailer that has not been published previously”.

Why it matters

The journal is the documented origin of Mailer’s mature preoccupations — hip and square, the psychopath as existential hero, a revisionist Freudianism, the body, dread, and violence — that surface a year later in “The White Negro” (57.1) and the Hipster idea, and run on through the omnibus Advertisements for Myself (59.13). A representative entry, whose thought Mailer would later fold into “The White Negro”:

Wild thought. The atom bomb may actually have kicked off hipsterism.

— Lipton’s Journal, no. 150 (31 December 1954)

(quotation via Project Mailer’s Lipton’s Journal; cited in the annotations to “The White Negro”).

The Lindner letters

The edition also prints, for the first time, the correspondence between Mailer and the psychoanalyst Robert Lindner — author of Rebel Without a Cause and The Fifty-Minute Hour — which frames Mailer’s state of mind during the journal’s composition.

Editors and reception

The volume was prepared by J. Michael Lennon (Mailer’s authorized biographer), Gerald R. Lucas (editor of Project Mailer and co-editor of Norman Mailer: Works and Days), and Susan Mailer (Mailer’s eldest child, a psychoanalyst), with an introduction and extensive endnotes. Robert J. Begiebing called the result “the seedbed of all Mailer’s work since 1955 — a text that anyone embarking on a serious reading or study of Mailer can’t afford to avoid”; Jason Mosser judged it “an invaluable contribution to the future of Mailer Studies”.

A note on this entry

This is the first entry in Works and Days drawn from outside Lennon & Lennon’s print edition — a post-2007, posthumous publication of Mailer material — and so it carries no legacy-id. It marks the register’s extension beyond 2016 (see About this project).