Because Mailer often addressed various modes of violence in his fiction and nonfiction, over time many readers have mistakenly believed that Mailer endorsed all forms violence. Yet Mailer was careful to parse the nuances of different forms of violence, and rarely, if ever, does violence go wholly unquestioned in his work. This chapter covers Mailer’s distinctive criticisms of violence, addressing his notions of “creative” violence versus purely destructive violence; his sharp criticisms of the violences enacted in Vietnam; his meditations on structural violence, and the connections he draws between violence, courage, and manhood.

Mailer’s philosophy of the Hipster is one of his most provocative: Outlined most clearly in “The White Negro,” “Reflections on Hip,” and “Hip, Hell, and the Navigator,” his figuration of the Hipster is an existentialist rebel, an “urban frontiersman” who lives in “the undercurrents and underworlds of American life” amongst “the defeated, the isolated, the violent, the tortured, and the warped.” Mailer’s characterization of the Hipster is the foundation for more than one of his later characters, and is reflective of his place on the periphery of countercultural groups like the Beats.

In a number of works, ranging from “The White Negro” to An American Dream to Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer controversially confronts the issue of race. As this chapter explains, he does so in ways that reflect the racist limitations of perspective arising from Mailer’s own position of privilege, and which also capture significant elements of the racial climate of the time.