1943
Mailer graduates from Harvard in May with an S.B. (with honors) in engineering sciences; visits Provincetown with Bea — his first time there, beginning a seven-decade association with Cape Cod; his parents move to 102 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn. No Mailer works published this year.
Spring
May — Mailer graduates from Harvard with the degree of S.B. (with honors) in engineering sciences. The majority of his electives have been English writing courses. Among his senior-year writing is the novella “A Calculus at Heaven,” written for Robert Hillyer’s English A-5 class — it will be published a year later in Seaver‘s Cross-Section (see 44.1).
Summer
After graduation, Mailer visits Provincetown, Massachusetts with Bea — his first time at the Cape Cod artists’ colony that will be his summer residence from the mid-1940s and his primary home from 1983 to 2007.
He then goes to his parents’ new apartment at 102 Pierrepont Street in the Brooklyn Heights section of Brooklyn (the family move of spring 1943).
The year’s writing
Mailer publishes nothing in 1943. He begins a draft of the novel A Transit to Narcissus, drawn from his 1942 summer at Boston State Hospital; he completes it in February 1944, and it remains unpublished until Howard Fertig’s facsimile edition of 1978 (see 1944 and A Transit to Narcissus).
Context
The U.S. is deep into WWII. Mailer’s post-graduation months are a short interregnum before his January 1944 draft notice.
Related pages
- 1942 | 1944
- A Calculus at Heaven
- Harvard University | Provincetown, Massachusetts | Beatrice Silverman