1950
Norman and Bea move from Hollywood to a Provincetown summer and then to Putney, Vermont, where they settle in October for the final push on Barbary Shore — the novel will be finished there and published by Rinehart the following May.
The year in one motion
Mailer continues work on Barbary Shore across three locations. The Mailers stay at 7475 Hillside Avenue in Hollywood until May, spend May to September in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in a house rented from Joseph Hawthorne, and in October move to Putney, Vermont (Lennon, “Residences”).
October — Putney, Vermont
By October the Mailers are settled in Putney, Vermont, in a house on Old Depot Road bought on 29 October (Lennon, “Residences”). Mailer stays into the winter of 1950–51, when he separates from Bea; by March 1951 he is living in New York with Adele Morales (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 349; Lennon, “Residences”). See 1951. Mailer completes the final version of Barbary Shore in Putney — a novel whose drafts have, in his later description, migrated “from some sort of fellow-traveler” position to “a far-flung mutation of Trotskyism … the last draft of Barbary Shore is a different novel altogether and has almost nothing in common with the first draft but the names”.
Context
1949’s Waldorf Conference and break with the Progressive Party leave ideological marks on Barbary Shore; the Hollywood summer of 1949 (screenplay work for Goldwyn, Malaquais‘s daily presence) feeds the book in ways Mailer will later describe to Steven Marcus as “subterranean.” For the Hollywood context, see 1949; for the novel’s publication and reception, see 1951.