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Norman Mailer: Works and Days A digital bio-bibliography

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.

Brooklyn was Mailer’s home borough for most of his life. He grew up in two of its neighborhoods, came back to his parents’ apartment in Brooklyn Heights between the war, Paris, and Hollywood, and from 1962 until his death in 2007 kept his house on the Heights, at 142 Columbia Heights, overlooking the harbor.

Mailer’s Brooklyn homes, in order

  1. Cortelyou Road, Flatbush. The family moved here from Long Branch, New Jersey in the fall of 1928 and stayed until January 1932 (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 343); J. Michael Lennon‘s compiled list of Mailer’s residences (January 2006) dates the Cortelyou Road years 1925–33 (Lennon, “Residences”). Mailer attended P.S. 181.
  2. 555 Crown Street, Crown Heights. The family home from January 1932 to 1943, through P.S. 161, Boys’ High School (1935–1939), and Mailer’s Harvard years.
  3. 102 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn Heights. His parents’ apartment from the spring of 1943 (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 346). Mailer stayed there in the summer and fall of 1943, after Harvard, and from his return from Paris in 1948 until the family left for Vermont and Hollywood early in 1949 (Lennon, “Residences”). A 2013 post on Lennon’s website also has him living there for a time in 1946, with Arthur Miller in the same building (“Never Amount to Anything,” 12 June 2013).
  4. 49 Remsen Street, Brooklyn Heights. Mailer’s own rooms, with a studio at 20 Remsen Street, from September 1946 to September 1947 (Lennon, “Residences”), the year in which he finished The Naked and the Dead in Brooklyn (1947).
  5. 142 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn Heights. His home from late spring 1962, when he moved in with Lady Jeanne Campbell, until his death. The published Days says he had bought the house in 1960 (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 353); Lennon’s residence list gives May 1962 (Lennon, “Residences”). The list also records no residence there from the fall of 1969 to the end of 1975, years spent in Provincetown and Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and shows Provincetown taking the larger share of his year from the early 1990s.
  6. Studios. From about 1986 to 1996 Mailer kept a fourth-floor studio down the street from 142 Columbia Heights, and from about 1996 to 2000 a rarely used studio in the DUMBO area (Lennon, “Residences”).

Between these Brooklyn homes Mailer also lived in Paris, Hollywood, and Vermont (1947–1951), in Manhattan (1951–1956 and 1958–1962), and in Bridgewater, Connecticut (1956–1958) (Lennon, “Residences”); see the Days pages for those years.

Brooklyn in the work

Brooklyn is a partial setting of Mailer’s unpublished first novel, No Percentage (1941), set “in Long Branch and Brooklyn” (see 1941), and his second novel, Barbary Shore (1951), takes place in a Brooklyn Heights boarding house. Evan Hughes’s Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life (2011) gives Mailer a chapter, “Underground Rumbles: Norman Mailer” (pp. 197–220).

Walking Mailer’s Brooklyn

On Sunday, 21 July 2013, Lennon led a Norman Mailer Brooklyn Walking Book Tour for the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony. It began at 1 p.m. in the lobby of the St. George Residence, 55 Clark Street, and ended about 3 p.m. at “the Norman Mailer Home,” 142 Columbia Heights. Along the way Lennon talked about Mailer’s and other writers’ experiences in Brooklyn Heights, his forthcoming authorized biography of Mailer, and Barbary Shore (“Brooklyn Walking Book Tour,” Norman Mailer Society, 23 May 2013). The notice gives only the start and end points of the route. Ten days later, on 31 July 2013, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Norman Mailer Center presented “Mailer’s Brooklyn,” a discussion of Mailer and the literary culture of Brooklyn led by Hughes in the Brooklyn Collection at the Central Library, Grand Army Plaza (“July Program: Mailer’s Brooklyn,” Brooklyn Public Library, 9 July 2013).

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Last updated: 2026-10-11