[3] Mailer's essay was controversial upon its release and received a mixed reception, winning praise, for example, from Eldridge Cleaver[citation needed] and criticism from James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Allen Ginsberg.

Baldwin, in particular, heavily criticized the work, asserting that it perpetuated the notorious "myth of the sexuality of Negros" and stating that it was beneath Mailer's talents.

According to the biography of Carl Rollyson, Mailer wanted to tap into the energy of the Beat Generation and the changes of consciousness members such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac inspired.

[13][14] Lipton's Journal, Mailer's unpublished 105,000-word diary of self-analysis (written over four months while experimenting with marijuana), also contributed to the essay's genesis.

[15] The journal documents "his insights [that] challenge some of the dominant ideas of Western thought", specifically the dualisms that Mailer saw within every individual, like that of the saint and the psychopath.

[14] Other influences on both Lipton's Journal and The White Negro include the psycho-sexual theories of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the writings of Karl Marx, and the music of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and other bebop jazz artists.

[20] In Section 1, Mailer argues that the twin horrors of the atom bomb and the concentration camps have wrought "psychic havoc" by subjecting individual human lives to the calculus of the state machine.

Section 2 proposes that the marginalized figure — "the American existentialist" — lives with the knowledge of quick death, the possibility of state violence, the compulsory need to conform, and the sublimation of baser desires.

[38] Finally, in Section 6, Mailer speculates whether "the last war of them all" will be between factions of socially polar communities or through despair at the current crisis of capitalism.

[39] True to his thesis in "First Advertisement for Myself" (from his 1959 collection of essays), Mailer can be seen to be attempting "a revolution in the consciousness of our time" by challenging the thoughts and practices that sanitized American life after World War II.

[43] For Mailer, writes Maggie McKinley, violence seems to be an essential part of the masculinity of the Hipster, helping to oppose collectivizing and numbing social forces.

[44] In a 1957 letter to a publicly critical Malaquais, Mailer clarified his beliefs that: (1) barbarism could be an alternative to totalitarianism, and (2) that human energy should not be sublimated at the expense of the individual.

[47] Although The White Negro takes as its subject a subcultural phenomenon, it represents a localized synthesis of Marx and Freud, and thus presages the New Left movement and the birth of the counterculture in the United States.

[citation needed] Rollyson suggests that Mailer dismissed a Freudian approach to psychology that called for the adjustment of the individual to societal norms and instead espoused Wilhem Reich's emphasis on sexual energy and orgasm.

[8] Christopher Brookeman created a possible motivation for Mailer through his idea of Marxism combined with a kind of "Reichian Freudianism" to find solutions "in the better orgasm" which in turn would allow for the rise of one's "full instinctual potential".

[48] Reich inspired Mailer as one of the few intellectuals or writers in general who had deeply explored the power, primacy and potential of the male orgasm.

[51] This quest for love — or "the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it" — allows the psychopath to become "an embodiment of the extreme contradictions of society which formed his character".

[38] Similarly, Ihab Hassan shows this duality by using the hipster's face as that of an "alienated" hero covered by a twisted mask in order to hide the look of disgust towards one's own experiences and encounters while out in "search of kicks".

[61] Young enthusiasts of Mailer's essay, states Lennon, carried their copies of the City Light's reprint proudly as a "trumpet of defiance" throughout an awakening nation.

[60] According to Tracy Dahlby, Mailer's views were a hot topic in 1957 and many of his critics accused him of accepting violence as a "form of existential expression".

[9] Similarly, Allen Ginsberg termed the essay "very square" and recalled that Jack Kerouac thought Mailer an "intellectual fool".

Several prominent critics, such as James Baldwin, chided Mailer publicly for their perception that, with The White Negro, he was openly aping lesser writers such as Jack Kerouac in order to jump on the bandwagon of moody, meandering, faux-thrill-seeking Beatniks.

[4] For Baldwin, Mailer's essay simply perpetuated the "myth of the sexuality of Negros" while attempting to sell white people their own innocence and purity.