In various newspaper columns, essays, interviews, and novels from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, Norman Mailer has brooded over the psychological and cultural implications of what he has termed the philosophy of Hip and, in so doing, expressed his own affinities with the values and ideas of the Beat Generation. In these writings Mailer takes alienation as a given and demands that the artist oppose rather than participate in what he sees as the totalitarian tendency of American society. Indeed he views the artist as a rebel and announces that he himself is "imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time." Mailer is, therefore, an advocate of more rather than less expression, which for him really means choosing life over death, for in "every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or...