The Blood of the Blunt
A c. 1951 short story unpublished in Mailer's lifetime, recovered from the Harry Ransom Center and first printed in The Mailer Review in 2012. A husband and wife confess their infidelities to each other in the small hours; the typescript cover sheet glosses the couple as "obviously N+B" — Norman and Bea.
“The Blood of the Blunt.” The Mailer Review 6.1 (2012), 9–27.
Previously unpublished short story, circa 1951. Preceded by a facsimile of the original manuscript from the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
A husband and wife, awake at two in the morning, confess their infidelities to each other in a bitter mutual reckoning. One of a group of stories Mailer wrote around 1951, in the period after Barbary Shore, and left unpublished in his lifetime; it first appeared in The Mailer Review in 2012. A note on the surviving typescript reads the couple as autobiographical — “obviously N+B,” Norman and his first wife, Bea (Beatrice Silverman) Mailer.
Related pages
- Love-Buds | La Petite Bourgeoise | The Thalian Adventure | Dr. Bulganoff and the Solitary Teste
- The Mailer Review
Editorial notes
- Source typescript: Harry Ransom Center, Norman Mailer Papers, Box 22 — Mailer’s c. 1951 gathering headed “Short Stories, post–Barbary Shore, probably,” where the “obviously N+B” gloss appears.
- Lennon Works and Days register entry 12.1 (confirmed during the 2009–2012 ingest; the earlier NMSF-linkage note that it carried no Lennon number is superseded).
- Cross-vault: Norman Mailer’s Short Fiction treats the piece as short fiction (
nmsf-id: blood-of-the-blunt).