Dr. Bulganoff and the Solitary Teste
A c. 1951 short story unpublished in Mailer's lifetime, recovered from the Ransom Center and first printed in The Mailer Review in 2017. A comic Brooklyn memoir-story about Dr. Selma Bulganoff, a Russian-émigré woman doctor and proponent of "the modern life," to whom the narrator's mother takes him for a boyhood medical visit.
“Dr. Bulganoff and the Solitary Teste.” The Mailer Review 11.1 (2017), 8–22.
A comic Brooklyn memoir-story: Dr. Selma Bulganoff, a Russian-émigré woman doctor and proponent of “the modern life,” is the physician to whom the narrator’s mother takes him for a boyhood visit. One of a group of stories Mailer wrote around 1951, in the period after Barbary Shore, and left unpublished in his lifetime; it first appeared in The Mailer Review in 2017.
Related pages
Editorial notes
- Source typescript: Harry Ransom Center, Norman Mailer Papers, Box 22 — the c. 1951 gathering Mailer headed “Short Stories, post–Barbary Shore, probably.”
- Post-2007 recovery; carries no Lennon Works and Days number.
- Cross-vault: Norman Mailer’s Short Fiction treats the piece as short fiction (
nmsf-id: dr-bulganoff).