Advertisements for Myself is a huge compendium of Mailer's writing from his Harvard years to the late 1950s. He has often pointed to this book as marking the turning point in his career and in his style. Perhaps the most important and most representative piece in the book is "The White Negro." "The White Negro" is akin to another myth Mailer invokes in his article: "the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time." To speak of a "Faustian urge" is to use myth to explain reality, or to imply that the myth speaks for some fundamental set of forces in reality that a "fiction" has profoundly articulated. "The White Negro" is white, or Western man, who sees in the Negro the reverse image of himself. Faustian man has conventionalized existence and made it conform to.....
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