CORRECTION APPENDED

When most people think of Norman K. Mailer ’43, the first image that comes to mind may well be of a strong-headed writer, blue eyes burning, actively seeking out public attention. But in 1939, according to his two roommates then, Mailer was a shy, 16-year-old freshman at Harvard who dazzled his English teacher with writing about sex.

“Norman Mailer as a freshman was completely different from the Norman Mailer who’s been portrayed in the newspapers for the past sixty years,” one roommate, Maxwell Kaufer ’43, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “He was very quiet, majored in mathematics, and was somewhat nerdy.”

Mailer, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who helped found the creative nonfiction style known as New Journalism, died of acute renal failure on Saturday. He was 84.

Mailer started to change after his freshman year, evolving into the character he would become known for in his six-decade career. According to a book by Peter Manso, Mailer began to voice his opinions more often after joining the campus literary magazine, The Advocate, in his sophomore year.

The most vivid memory that fellow roommate Richard L. Weinberg ’43 had of Mailer was his A-plus on a novelette in English A, the 1939 version of Expos. Weinberg, 85, said he didn’t remember what the piece was about.

Kaufer, 85, recalled the novelette, as well. “We all started out getting C’s, Weinberg and I,” he said. “And then all of a sudden, [Mailer] started getting A-pluses, and we didn’t know why—until we started reading his essays, and they were all about sex! And he was a virgin.”

Weinberg called Mailer “kind of a loner” and didn’t recall him going on any dates his freshman year. Mailer then moved to Dunster House (Kaufer and Weinberg went to Winthrop), where he lived with Martin Lubin ’43 in his junior year.

In a brief telephone interview, Lubin remembered Mailer as “a rebel without a cause.” [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

According to Weinberg, it was the A-plus in English—along with joining The Advocate sophomore year and winning the National Short Story Contest in 1941—that gave Mailer something of a cause: writing.

Both Kaufer and Weinberg said they were astounded when they read “The Naked and the Dead,” Mailer’s first novel, a vivid depiction of war based on Mailer’s experience as a soldier in the Pacific in World War II.

“It showed a completely different Norman Mailer,” Kaufer said.

Mailer would go on to write over 30 books, but both roommates said “The Naked and the Dead”—a World War II novel that the writer published when he was only 25—was their favorite.

Although Kaufer and Weinberg did not see much of him after freshman year, both have fond memories of Mailer.

Kaufer remembered one particular afternoon after the two had had a fight: “I was lying down on my bed trying to get a little nap, and I was sort of half in half out of wakefulness, and my glasses were in my hand, hanging over the bed side, and I sort of heard Norman come in—he had to walk into my bedroom to go into his. And he just gently took the glasses out of my hand and put them on the desk so they wouldn’t fall.

“So, that’s the side of Norman you never hear them talk about,” he added.

CORRECTION: The Nov. 13 news article "Peers Recall Quieter Mailer" misquoted Martin Lubin '43, a roommate of Norman K. Mailer '43. Lubin described Mailer as a "rebel without a pause," not a "rebel without a cause."