Harvard University

Mailer entered Harvard in September 1939, initially to study aeronautical engineering, and graduated in May 1943 with an S.B. (with honors) in engineering sciences; along the way he discovered American literature, joined the Harvard Advocate editorial board, took the writing courses with Robert Gorham Davis and Robert Hillyer that produced his first published fiction, and met lifelong connections including John W. Aldridge and Beatrice Silverman (in Chelsea, during his Harvard years).

Mailer was admitted to both Harvard and M.I.T. in 1939; he chose Harvard partly because the name “resonate[d] with Brooklyn girls”. He entered in late September 1939 intending to study aeronautical engineering but soon discovered modern American literature — Farrell, Dos Passos, Steinbeck — over the winter of 1939–40, and in 1940 read D.H. Lawrence’s then-unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the Widener Library Treasure Room, saying later that it “changed my sex life, or rather, accelerated it”.

His writing apprenticeship at Harvard produced the four earliest items in the register:

• “The Greatest Thing in the World” (41.1), written for Robert Gorham Davis‘s English 1-A in his sophomore year, 1940–41.
• “Right Shoe on Left Foot” (42.1) and “Maybe Next Year” (42.2), both in the Harvard Advocate, 1942.
• “A Calculus at Heaven” (44.1), written for Robert Hillyer’s English A-5 in Mailer’s senior year and published after graduation in Edwin Seaver‘s Cross-Section anthology (New York: L.B. Fischer, April 1944).

Mailer was elected to the Harvard Advocate editorial board in April 1941, the same month the Advocate published “The Greatest Thing in the World”; he was elected to the Signet Society, a merit-based luncheon club, in May 1941. He took Howard Mumford Jones’s “Modern American Literature” in the spring of 1942, one of only two literature classes he took at Harvard — a drama survey in his senior year was the other. In September 1941 he completed his unpublished first novel, No Percentage (408 manuscript pages), set in Long Branch and Brooklyn.

Mailer received his S.B. with honors in May 1943. The Harvard years form the first major life phase in the Days spine; later Harvard connections recur across Mailer’s career (lectures, readings, the Harvard Lampoon, and the deposit of Mailer’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas rather than at Harvard itself).

Stub; to be expanded across later Harvard-related pages.

Related pages

• 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944
• The Greatest Thing in the World | Right Shoe on Left Foot | Maybe Next Year | A Calculus at Heaven
• The Harvard Advocate | Robert Gorham Davis | John W. Aldridge | Beatrice Silverman

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Last updated: 2026-04-21