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Authors have to be pretty careful about the photos they choose to have on their dust jackets. Not only is it remarkably easy to fall prey to one of those pesky author photo clichés, but those first baby-faced pictures that grace debut novels might just go down in history — if they’re lucky. To that end, we scoured the web to pull together a few surprising, intense, and charmingly youthful author photos from some of our very favorite authors’ first works — check them out after the jump, and as always, be sure to link us to any great ones we’ve missed in the comments!

A very intense Norman Mailer on the back of The Naked and the Dead, 1948