Love-Buds
A Harvard senior-year story (1942–43), never published in Mailer's lifetime, first printed in The Mailer Review in 2013. Two seventeen-year-old boys make a pilgrimage to a Scranton brothel to lose their virginity, fail, and bond over the shared admission.
“Love-Buds.” The Mailer Review 7.1 (2013), 11–27.
Two seventeen-year-old boys at a New Jersey shore hotel make a pilgrimage to a Scranton brothel to lose their virginity, fail, and bond over the shared admission. A Harvard senior-year story (1942–43) and a companion to “A Calculus at Heaven,” never published in Mailer’s lifetime; it first appeared in The Mailer Review in 2013.
Related pages
Editorial notes
- Dating: Phil Sipiora‘s Mailer Review introduction places the story in Mailer’s senior year, and J. Michael Lennon concurs in Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013), noting it was “written his senior year but never submitted as class work.” The recurring protagonist “Al” and the adolescent subject confirm the earlier date even though the typescript is physically filed with the c. 1951 stories.
- Source typescript: Harry Ransom Center, Norman Mailer Papers, Box 22.
- Lennon Works and Days register entry 13.3 (confirmed during the 2013–2016 ingest; the earlier NMSF-linkage note that it carried no Lennon number is superseded).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: love-buds).