Right Shoe on Left Foot
A story of racial and sexual violence in the South, published in the Harvard Advocate in May 1942 during Mailer's junior year; never reprinted (per Lennon 42.1).
Publication
The Harvard Advocate, Vol. CXXVIII, No. 5 (May 1942) — the Spring Fiction Issue — pages 12–18 and 30–33. Lennon describes the piece as a “story of racial and sexual violence in the South, never reprinted”. Lennon’s citation gives the volume as “LXXVI”; the masthead of the original issue reads “Vol. CXXVIII, No. 5,” and our citation here follows the printed issue.
The story is one of two Mailer Advocate pieces from 1942, both written during his time on the magazine’s editorial board; the other, “Maybe Next Year” (42.2), appeared the following month.
Mailer on the masthead
The May 1942 issue carried Mailer on the editorial masthead as one of two Editors, alongside Bruce B. Phemister. The masthead placement is modest documentary evidence for Mailer’s standing on the Advocate’s editorial board during his junior year — between his election to the magazine in April 1941 and his senior year.
Full text
A full transcription of the story from the printed May 1942 Advocate is available at wiki/texts/1942-05-right-shoe-on-left-foot, preserving Mailer’s spelling and dialect and noting the original printer’s slips. The full-text page is held under rights: REQUEST-NEEDED (Mailer Estate for literary rights; Harvard Advocate for typographic arrangement) and provisional fair-use for the scholarly register.
Note on the absence of reprints
Unlike “The Greatest Thing in the World” (41.1, heavily anthologized) and “Maybe Next Year” (42.2, collected in the 1950 Harvard Advocate Anthology and in Advertisements for Myself), “Right Shoe on Left Foot” was not brought back into Mailer’s reprint cycle. Whether the reason was subject-matter discomfort, Mailer’s own assessment, or simply editorial choice is unresolved.