The Thalian Adventure
A c. 1951 short story unpublished in Mailer's lifetime, recovered from the Ransom Center and first printed in The Mailer Review in 2015. A freshly graduated narrator drags his bickering Brooklyn family to an art-house screening of Fritz Lang's M, and the cultural-education project ends in family-wide alienation.
“The Thalian Adventure.” The Mailer Review 9.1 (2015), 9–26.
A young man drags his bickering Brooklyn parents and relatives to an art-house cinema to see Fritz Lang’s M, and the cultural-education project collapses into alienation. The narrator’s situation — “the interval between the time I graduated from college and was drafted into the Army” — corresponds to Mailer’s own 1943–44, narrated retrospectively. One of a group of stories Mailer wrote around 1951, in the period after Barbary Shore, and left unpublished in his lifetime; it first appeared in The Mailer Review in 2015.
Related pages
- The Blood of the Blunt | La Petite Bourgeoise | Dr. Bulganoff and the Solitary Teste
- The Mailer Review
Editorial notes
- Source typescript: Harry Ransom Center, Norman Mailer Papers, Box 22 — the c. 1951 “Short Stories, post–Barbary Shore, probably” gathering.
- Lennon Works and Days register entry 15.1 (confirmed during the 2013–2016 ingest; the earlier NMSF-linkage note that it carried no Lennon number is superseded).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: thalian-adventure).