The Greatest Thing in the World
Mailer's first published story, placed in the Harvard Advocate in April 1941 during his sophomore year at Harvard; won Story magazine's Eighth Annual College Contest and $100, gave Mailer his first national notice, and — on his own later account — is what "fortified" him to begin treating himself as a writer.
Publication
The Harvard Advocate, April 1941, pages 3–6 and 24–28. Mailer’s original working title for the piece was “The Suckers and the Setup”; he wrote it for Robert Gorham Davis‘s English 1-A class in his sophomore year, 1940–41. Davis encouraged Mailer to submit the story to Story magazine’s Eighth Annual College Contest under the byline “Norman K[ingsley]. Mailer.” It won first prize of $100.
The prize had a lasting onomastic effect: “Mailer ceased using his middle initial and name after college, although he employed it once for his 1971 movie, Maidstone: A Mystery (71.28), in which the director-hero is called Norman T. Kingsley”.
Mailer on the contest, in a 1964 interview (64.1): “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”.
Reprints
Per Lennon 41.1, the story was reprinted in:
- Story 19 (November–December 1941), 17–26. First reprint, carrying the contest win into the magazine’s own pages.
- Hold Your Breath: Suspense Stories, edited by Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Dell, no. 260, 1947).
- Story: The Fiction of the Forties, edited by Whit Burnett and Hallie Burnett (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1949).
- Advertisements for Myself (59.13) — preceded in that volume by an introductory “advertisement”.
- 67.11 and 82.19 (to be catalogued in their respective years).
Reception
The Harvard Crimson editorial of 21 April 1941 (unsigned, 2 cols.) — occasioned by the Advocate’s publication of 41.1 — is recorded by Lennon as “the first published critical (and favorable) comment on Mailer’s work”. See [[bibliography/1941]] for the row.
Later Mailer-retrospective commentary on the story appears passim in Advertisements for Myself (59.13) and at 75.14, 77.2, 83.10, 89.10, and 13.2 (to be catalogued in their respective years).
Full text
A scanned copy of the original Advocate printing was supplied by Jerry Lucas (PDF at media/scans/1941-04-greatest-thing-in-the-world.pdf). A draft OCR transcription of the text lives at full text (rights pending, proof pending) with rights: REQUEST-NEEDED pending clearance and pending a full proof pass against the scan.
Related pages
- 1941 | Right Shoe on Left Foot | Maybe Next Year | A Calculus at Heaven
- The Harvard Advocate | Story | Harvard University | Robert Gorham Davis
- Full text (rights pending): texts/1941-04-greatest-thing-in-the-world
- Maidstone: A Mystery (71.28) | Norman Mailer: The Art of Fiction XXXII (64.1) | The Greatest Thing in the World (41.1) | Advertisements for Myself (59.13) | The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (67.11) | The Essential Mailer (82.19) | Preface to Fiction Writer's Handbook (75.14) | Our Man at Harvard (77.2) | Twelfth Round: An Interview with Norman Mailer (83.10) | Norman Mailer: A Double Life (13.2)