1942
Mailer's junior year at Harvard. Two Harvard Advocate stories — "Right Shoe on Left Foot" (May) and "Maybe Next Year" (June). A summer job as an attendant at the Boston State Hospital — formerly the Boston Lunatic Asylum — yields an unpublished play titled "The Naked and the Dead" (unrelated to the 1948 novel but marking the first appearance of that title in Mailer's work).
Spring
Mailer takes Howard Mumford Jones’s “Modern American Literature,” one of only two literature courses he will take at Harvard (a drama survey in his senior year is the other).
May — The Harvard Advocate publishes “Right Shoe on Left Foot” (42.1) on pages 12–18 and 30–33 — “story of racial and sexual violence in the South, never reprinted”.
June — The Harvard Advocate publishes “Maybe Next Year” (42.2) on pages 25–27. Mailer will later note of it in Advertisements for Myself: “the prose is Salinger-ish, but the inspiration was by Faulkner”.
Summer
Mailer works briefly as an attendant at the Boston State Hospital — formerly called the Boston Lunatic Asylum. On the basis of the one-week job he writes an unpublished play titled “The Naked and the Dead,” the first time that title appears in Mailer’s work. The title will return six years later — radically reassigned — for the Pacific-theater war novel (48.2).
Context
The U.S. war effort enters its first full year. Mailer is not yet eligible for the draft. His Harvard studies continue.
Related pages
- 1941 | 1943
- Right Shoe on Left Foot | Maybe Next Year | The Naked and the Dead
- Harvard University | The Harvard Advocate