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The Source Of Hip, Shelly J. Eversley

Publications and Research

This essay situates Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" (1957) and Jack Keroauc's The Subterraneans (1958) in the context of 1950s racial integration and the transformative potential of interracial sex. It argues that both authors' terms, "beat" and "hip," depend on the idea of "the Negro" whose status allows them to imagine a counter culture essential to their midcentury articulations of individual integrity and creative freedom.