Ted Joans, The Hipsters, (New York, NY: Corinth Books; distributed by the Citadel Press, 1961

Published at the height of the Rent-a-Beatnik era, Ted Joans, a surrealist, artist, writer, and performer known for his performances where he mocked the Beat aesthetic, captures the “The funny, wild, hilarious and witty world of the hipsters from Greenwich Village to Paris, A mixture of Dali, Ernst and Kerouac stirred up in a surrealist stew by America’s only true “insider” and “outsider”—Ted Joans, a young Negro painter and coffee shop poet…”(cover).

With performance at the heart of the Beat Generation, it gave birth to social and artistic performances among both Blacks and whites that stereotyped Beats as “Hipsters” (first explored in Norman Mailer’s The White Negro, 1957). These Hipsters, “could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one’s own voice…” (Mailer, 1957). As Beats appropriated the life and culture of minorities, their act awakens legacies of minstrelsy, godfathered through the Blues.