1933
In the winter of 1933–34, under the combined influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars novels and the Flash Gordon radio program, Norman — age ten — writes a long science fiction story, "The Martian Invasion." It is his earliest attributed sustained writing.
Winter 1933–1934
Norman, ten years old and a student at P.S. 161, writes “The Martian Invasion” — a long science fiction story influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars novels (the John Carter series) and the Flash Gordon radio program. The manuscript does not survive in print; Lennon records it as the earliest of Mailer’s sustained early juvenilia.