From ONE DROP by BLISS BROYARD

ONE DROP My Father's Hidden Life - A Story of Race and Family Secrets by Bliss Broyard C 2007 Little Brown and Co New York 

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...

GORE VIDAL Quote From PALIMPSEST

From PALIMPSEST a memoir by GORE VIDAL

 page 239 hardback

...Although I have had several lifelong friends who were writers, I have never much enjoyed the company of writers. I also did not realize, nor did the others at ... gatherings, that we had arrived on the scene to witness the end of the novel. Today the word novelist still enjoys considerable prestige, so much so that both Mailer and Capote chose to call works of journalism novels. But that was thirty years ago. Today an ambitious writer would be well advised to label any work of his imagination nonfiction, or perhaps, a memoir.

One day, in the spring on 1950, I was invited to lunch by a very ambitious, very young southern novelist who wanted to shine in those social circles that are, for the most part, closed to very young ambitious southern writers. Like Capote, he wanted to be accepted by what was known than as cafe society, and like Capote, he had mistaken it for the great and largely invisible to outsiders, world that Proust had so obsessively retrieved from lost time. In later years , I liked to pretend that Capote had actually picked the right ladder and I would observe,... "Truman Capote has tried, with some success, to get into a world that I have tried, with some success to get out of." Truman was surprisingly innocent. He mistook the rich who liked publicity for the ruling class, and he made himself far too much at home among them, only to find that he was to them no more than an amusing person who could be dispensed with, as he was when he published lurid gossip about them. Although of little interest or value in themselves, these self-invented figures are nothing if not tough, and quite as heartless as the real things, as the dying Swan discovered when he found that his life meant less to his esteemed ... than her pair of red shoes."