A Mystery (from The Martian Invasion)
A one-page chapter from The Martian Invasion, a space adventure Mailer wrote at about age ten; reprinted in the anthology As They Were (1973), a collection of the juvenilia of the famous.
“A Mystery,” chapter 11 of The Martian Invasion — a space adventure Mailer wrote at age ten, or perhaps earlier — reprinted as a one-page excerpt in As They Were, edited by Tuli Kupferberg and Sylvia Topp (New York: Links, 1973), a softcover volume of childhood photographs and juvenilia of the famous. Reprinted in First Glance: Childhood Creations of the Famous (Hammond, 1978). The earliest surviving Mailer fiction in print; a candidate for a story page in the sister project Norman Mailer’s Short Fiction. A full transcription is held at full text.