“It Might Not Be Unpleasant to Live”

Mailer’s conviction to become a “psychic outlaw” has its genesis in his negative experience publishing The Deer Park, but his thoughts were leaning in this direction even before: specifically in his transitional short fiction that acts as a proving ground for ideas he workshopped in Lipton’s Journal and published in Advertisements for Myself—specifically in “The White Negro.” The group of short stories dating from the winter of 1951–52 allowed Mailer a space to explore the subversive ideas that would characterize his work after Advertisements for Myself.