It
Mailer's shortest story — a four-sentence war micro-fiction written in 1939, days after he arrived at Harvard, prompted by Archibald MacLeish's freshman address on the outbreak of the Second World War. First published within Advertisements for Myself (1959).
“It.” In Advertisements for Myself, 391. New York: Putnam, 6 November 1959.
By Mailer’s own Advertisement the piece was “written in 1939, a few days after I came to Harvard. Archibald MacLeish gave the address to our Freshman Class, and as he was talking about the beginning of the Second World War, I jotted down a short story, the shortest story I’ve ever written.” Composed at sixteen, it is the earliest of his collected stories — only the childhood “The Collision” (1933) is earlier among the surviving fiction. First published within Advertisements for Myself (59.13); reprinted in The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (67.11).
Related pages
- Advertisements for Myself | Great in the Hay
- The Greatest Thing in the World | The Collision
- The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (67.11)
Editorial notes
- The story had no separate first publication: it first appeared inside Advertisements for Myself and carries no separate Lennon number (Lennon documents it within the AFM entry, 59.13). Given a standalone Work page so its cross-vault link resolves one-to-one.
- Cross-vault: Norman Mailer’s Short Fiction treats it as short fiction (
nmsf-id: it).