Places

22 Place pages

Entities: People · Places · Publishers · Organizations · Concepts

102 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn — The Brooklyn Heights apartment building where Mailer's parents lived from the spring of 1943. Mailer stayed there after his Harvard graduation in 1943 and again in 1948, after his return from Paris; a 2013 post on J. Michael Lennon's website also places him there for a time in 1946, writing The Naked and the Dead, with Arthur Miller in the same building.
142 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn — Mailer's four-story Brooklyn Heights brownstone overlooking New York Harbor, bought in 1960 or 1962 (sources differ) and his Brooklyn home from late spring 1962 until his death in 2007, though from the 1990s he lived more and more in Provincetown.
565 Commercial Street, Provincetown — The house on Commercial Street in Provincetown, formerly the Rubenstein property, that Mailer bought in June 1966 and where he spent summers with Beverly Bentley and their children until the marriage ended in 1969; he was there again in July 1977.
627 Commercial Street, Provincetown — The brick house on the Provincetown waterfront that Mailer bought in October 1983 and kept as his year-round home there until his death in 2007, dividing his time between it and Brooklyn Heights. After his death it housed the Norman Mailer Writers Colony until his children put it up for sale in 2013.
92nd Street Y (Y.M.H.A.) — The Young Men's Hebrew Association on Manhattan's Upper East Side, whose Unterberg Poetry Center has been since the 1930s one of the country's principal reading-and-lecture venues. Mailer read here on 6 February 1961; an administrator ordered the curtain down on him during the reading for obscenity, with Allen Ginsberg in the audience defending him. The episode generated a New York Times article (61.3a) and a mocking Time snippet (61.3b).
Bellevue Hospital — The New York City public hospital whose psychiatric ward held Mailer for seventeen days of observation, 22 November–8 December 1960, after he stabbed Adele Morales in the early morning of 20 November.
Bridgewater, Connecticut — The Connecticut town where the Mailers lived from the fall of 1956, near William Styron. It is the setting of Mailer's boxing lessons with Al Morales and of the orgone box he built there.
Brooklyn Heights — The Brooklyn neighborhood, overlooking the East River and Lower Manhattan, where Mailer's parents lived from 1943 and he himself lived after the war, and his principal home from 1962 until his death in 2007 - centered on the four-story brownstone he owned at 142 Columbia Heights.
Brooklyn, New York — The New York borough that was Mailer's home for most of his life: Flatbush and Crown Heights in childhood, his parents' Pierrepont Street apartment and his own Remsen Street rooms in Brooklyn Heights in the 1940s, and the brownstone at 142 Columbia Heights from 1962 until his death in 2007.
Carnegie Hall — The Manhattan concert hall where Mailer gave a four-part public reading on 31 May 1963, describing himself as 'the closest a middle-aged man can get to being a bullfighter.'
Crown Heights, Brooklyn — The Brooklyn neighborhood where the Mailers lived from January 1932, at 555 Crown Street — Mailer's home through P.S. 161, Boys' High School, and (between absences) the Harvard and war years.
Flatbush, Brooklyn — The Brooklyn neighborhood where the Mailer family lived from the 1928 move from Long Branch until January 1932 — on Cortelyou Road — and where Mailer attended P.S. 181.
Harvard University — Mailer entered Harvard in September 1939, initially to study aeronautical engineering, and graduated in May 1943 with an S.B. (with honors) in engineering sciences; along the way he discovered American literature, joined the Harvard Advocate editorial board, took the writing courses with Robert Gorham Davis and Robert Hillyer that produced his first published fiction, and met lifelong connections including John W. Aldridge and Beatrice Silverman (in Chelsea, during his Harvard years).
Hollywood, California — The Los Angeles neighborhood that served as the center of the American film industry from the 1910s onward. Mailer's residence from June 1949 to May 1950; the setting of his and Jean Malaquais's unsuccessful screenplay work for Samuel Goldwyn, the bulk of his Barbary Shore first draft, his first meeting with Lois Mayfield Wilson, and the birth of his first child Susan on 28 August 1949.
Long Branch, New Jersey — The New Jersey shore town where Norman Mailer was born on 31 January 1923 and spent his first five years; home to his maternal grandparents the Schneiders and to the family's beach-cottage business "Kingsley Court," named after Norman himself. The Mailers continue to summer here through the 1930s after moving to Brooklyn in fall 1928. Long Branch is a partial setting of Mailer's unpublished 1941 first novel No Percentage, and the town hosted Norman Mailer Society conferences in 2016 and 2022.
Palm Springs, California — Desert resort town in Riverside County, Southern California, east of Los Angeles. Setting of Mailer's June 1951 trip with Mickey Knox — the biographical seed for "Desert D'Or," the fictionalized Palm Springs of The Deer Park (1955).
Paris, France — Mailer and Bea Silverman lived in Paris from autumn 1947 through summer 1948 on the GI Bill, nominally as Mailer's Sorbonne year. The city was where Mailer met his "lifelong friend and mentor on Marxism and the Russian Revolution" Jean Malaquais, finished the galley corrections for The Naked and the Dead, and learned by transatlantic mail that the book had topped the New York Times bestseller list.
Provincetown, Massachusetts — The artists' colony at the tip of Cape Cod that became Mailer's lifelong summer haunt — beginning with the North Truro cottage where he started The Naked and the Dead in the summer of 1946 — and, from his purchase of 627 Commercial Street in 1983, his second home, where he lived year-round in his last decade and is buried.
Putney, Vermont — Small town in Windham County, southern Vermont, where Norman and Bea Mailer lived from October 1950, completing the final version of Barbary Shore, until Mailer separated from Bea in the winter of 1950-51. A brief but consequential residence — the last of the Mailer–Silverman years and the locus of the novel that ends Mailer's immediate-postwar critical standing.
Stockbridge, Massachusetts — The Berkshire town where Mailer and Carol Stevens lived from 1972, in a house he bought on Yale Hill, until he left her for Norris Church at the end of 1975; he sold the house in 1977.
Town Hall (New York) — Manhattan performance hall; site of the 30 April 1971 'Dialogue on Women's Liberation' that Mailer moderated, later filmed as Town Bloody Hall.
Whitney Museum of American Art — New York museum of American art; site of the September 1971 premiere of Mailer's film Maidstone.