"The Man Who Studied Yoga", a novella by Norman Mailer written in 1952, was first published in the 1956 collection New Short Novels 2 then later in Mailer's 1959 miscellany Advertisements for Myself (AFM). It is a tale of a "writer manqué", or a writer who fails to write, reflecting some of Mailer's own anxiety in the 1950s as he tries to reinvent himself. The story's events take place on a Sunday in winter and center around Sam Slovoda, a sort of bourgeois everyman, who senses that his life is dull and even why it's dull, but cannot take the risks necessary to make it better. Sam and his situation seem to reflect what Mailer viewed as the malaise of middle-class America in the 1950s, created and maintained by the language of psychoanalysis and the privileging of the rational mind over lived experience. Mailer saw a new type of totalitarianism threatening America: that of middle-class comfort and conformity. "Yoga" examines the cost of a structured and secure middle-class life on a character who is aware of his mediocrity, but can do nothing to rise above it. "Yoga" is also a story about the creation of art and finding one's voice, perhaps part of Mailer's attempt to exorcise his own literary demons after the success of The Naked and the Dead. Source: Wikipedia (en)