Bliss' father was Anatole Paul Broyard, a literary critic for the New York Times, who had been born in New Orleans and had decided to "pass" as White when he began to work.
Page 366 about Greenwich Village.
"In the Village, a cold-water flat could be had cheaply. Barkeepers let a person sit for as long as he could nurse a beer. A ten-cent plate of spaghetti and meatballs from the Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue could fend off hunger for most of the day. Among the artists and writers who hung out in the San Remo Bar, the Cedar Bar, and the Minetta and White Horse taverns, conversation was the only currency that mattered.
"Nobody cared where a person was from; nobody asked about your family. They wanted to know what you thought --- about Freud, Surrealism, The Modernists. Had you been to Paris?...Were you in analysis?...What did you make of the Stevens poem in the latest Partisan Review? Everyone in the Village had run away---from conventional backgrounds and burdensome family histories, from petty lives short on grandeur and futures that would leave them as normal and discontented as everyone else. It was in Greenwich Village that my father could figure out the person he most felt himself to be...
Page 387
"Onto this unexplored frontier a new cultural hero appeared --the hispter. Famously portrayed by Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay "The White Negro," this latest incarnation of the American individualist rejected all pressures to conform, ignored society's expectations and traditions, and lived only for the moment and according to the "rebellious imperatives of the self." Found in New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago, and especially Greenwich Village, Mailer's hipster too inspiration for "Negros," particularity those associated with jazz...
