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.
102 Pierrepont Street is a brownstone apartment building in Brooklyn Heights. Barney and Fan Mailer moved there from 555 Crown Street in the spring of 1943, and after his Harvard graduation that May and a first visit to Provincetown with Bea, Mailer went to his parents’ new apartment (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 346). J. Michael Lennon‘s compiled list of Mailer’s residences (January 2006) places him there in the summer and fall of 1943 (Lennon, “Residences”).
After the war
The sources differ on where Mailer lived in Brooklyn after his 1946 discharge. Lennon’s residence list gives 49 Remsen Street, also in the Heights, from September 1946 to September 1947, with a separate studio at 20 Remsen, and records no 1946 stay at Pierrepont Street (Lennon, “Residences”). A 2013 post on Lennon’s website says that in 1946, while writing The Naked and the Dead, Mailer lived for a time with his parents at 102 Pierrepont, where Arthur Miller, then writing Death of a Salesman, also lived. Mailer recalled their chats at the mailbox, each, he believed, privately sure that “that other guy is never going to amount to anything” (“Never Amount to Anything,” 12 June 2013). The post gives no months. The novel was finished in Brooklyn in September 1947.
1948
The residence list puts Mailer back at 102 Pierrepont from May to December 1948, after the year in Paris (Lennon, “Residences”). The published Days has him returning from France on 21 July, after The Naked and the Dead had appeared on 6 May; the list’s May start also overlaps its own entries for Paris (January–June) and Provincetown (July–August). The list then has the Mailers in Jamaica, Vermont, from January to May 1949 and in Hollywood from June (Lennon, “Residences”).
Related pages
- Brooklyn Heights | Brooklyn, New York | Crown Heights, Brooklyn | 142 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn
- 1943 | 1946 | 1947 | 1948 | The Naked and the Dead