The Time of Her Time
Mailer's most celebrated short story, first published within Advertisements for Myself (1959). Sergius O'Shaugnessy's three-night sexual contest with Denise Gondelman in his Greenwich Village loft. The second half was suppressed for legal reasons in the 1961 British edition; Mailer answered with a polemical postscript.
“The Time of Her Time.” In Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam, 6 November 1959.
Mailer’s most-anthologized and highest-regarded short story: Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s three-night sexual contest with the Jewish NYU student Denise Gondelman in his Greenwich Village loft — the Sergius material carried over from the abandoned eight-novel scheme. It first appeared within Advertisements for Myself (59.13), with no prior periodical publication.
On legal advice the André Deutsch British edition (1961) dropped twenty of the story’s twenty-six pages; Mailer’s 400-word polemical postscript (61.15) names the censorship and challenges British writers to fight it. The full text was restored only in the 1968 Panther softcover. Reprinted in The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (67.11) and in The Time of Our Time (1998).
Related pages
- Advertisements for Myself | Untitled postscript to 'The Time of Her Time'
- Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out
- The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (67.11)
Editorial notes
- The story carries no separate Lennon number: it first appeared inside Advertisements for Myself, and Lennon records it within that omnibus entry (59.13) rather than numbering it on its own. Given a standalone Work page so its cross-vault link resolves one-to-one.
- Cross-vault: Norman Mailer’s Short Fiction carries the full edition apparatus for the story (
nmsf-id: time-of-her-time).