Norman Mailer’s "real" Facebook

Facebook. No doubt you’ve heard of it. But did you know that the origin of Facebook really comes from the concept of a “freshman facebook”? Many universities publish and distribute a yearbook of sorts to its incoming freshman students that includes registrants’ photos and a few biographical details about them. The idea is that this book will be a tool to help students get to know one another in the incoming class.

At Harvard University, this directory is known as the Harvard Freshman Red Book Register, and this practice had been in place for three years (started by the class of 1940) by the time Norman Mailer matriculated in 1939. Mailer would graduate in the class of 1943. His Harvard Freshman Red Book Register, published in December of 1939, has a companion <Harvard Freshman Red Book, which was published in May and is a summary of the first year in college. In his Register you can see the equivalent of “posting on his wall” in comments he literally penciled in about himself next to his photo on page 93 (“Beautiful, alluring, gorgeous”), as well as those scrawled in by his friends and initialed in good fun—we assume (“We all don’t like him”).

These books are two of the numerous holdings from Mailer’s personal library, which numbers around 900 volumes in the Ransom Center book collection. His library was acquired with his papers, comprising more than 1,000 boxes of materials, by the Ransom Center in 2005 along with another sizeable collection of more than 150 books, the Thomas Fiske collection of Norman Mailer. Within these collections, it is interesting and fun to recreate how Mailer grew from a high school student with a penchant for math, to a college Red Book editorial board staffer and engineering major, and finally evolved into a boisterous and prolific writer who published novels, articles, and poetry on everything from literature to race, feminism, sexuality, politics, art, culture, and society. Among his papers, there are high school and college journals, scrapbooks, grade reports, and even sweet and creative letters written home to his parents. Later materials consist of unpublished stories, handwritten notes, typed drafts, galley proofs, screenplays, and first editions of all his published books.

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