Story
American little magazine (founded 1931 by Whit Burnett and Martha Foley) devoted exclusively to short fiction; sponsor of the Eighth Annual College Contest won by Mailer's "The Greatest Thing in the World" in 1941 (prize: $100), and the venue for the story's first reprint in Story 19 (November–December 1941), 17–26.
Story was launched in Vienna in 1931 by Whit Burnett and Martha Foley and relocated to New York by 1933; through the 1930s and 1940s it was among the most prestigious outlets for short fiction in English, publishing early work by Salinger, Capote, McCullers, Cheever, and others. Its annual college contest identified emerging writers from American undergraduate campuses.
Mailer submitted “The Greatest Thing in the World” — originally titled “The Suckers and the Setup” and written for Robert Gorham Davis‘s English 1-A at Harvard — to Story’s Eighth Annual College Contest at Davis’s encouragement, under the name Norman K[ingsley]. Mailer. It won first prize of $100. Mailer later recalled: “when I found out it had won — which was at the beginning of the summer after my sophomore year — well, that fortified me, and I sat down and wrote a novel. It was called No Percentage. It was just terrible. But I never questioned any longer whether I was started as a writer” (64.1, quoted in 1941-1948-works.pdf, 41.1).
Story reprinted the winning story in its November–December 1941 issue, pages 17–26. The same story was subsequently collected in Alfred Hitchcock’s Hold Your Breath: Suspense Stories (Dell, no. 260, 1947) and in Story: The Fiction of the Forties, edited by Whit and Hallie Burnett (Dutton, 1949); see the Work page for the full reprint trail.
Stub; expand if Mailer recurs in Story or if Burnett/Foley correspondence comes into scope.
Related pages
- 1941 | The Greatest Thing in the World
- Robert Gorham Davis | The Harvard Advocate
- Norman Mailer: The Art of Fiction XXXII (64.1)