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 Long Branch is a partial setting of Mailer's unpublished 1941 first novel No Percentage, and the town hosted Norman Mailer Society conferences in 2016 and 2022.
Long Branch is a small resort and shore town in Monmouth County on the Jersey coast, about 60 miles south of New York City. By the time Norman is born there in January 1923, the Schneider family — Rabbi Chaim Jehuda Schneider, Ida Kamrass Schneider, and their children — has been in the town for more than a generation and operates hotels and beach cottages along the shore.
Kingsley Court
The newlywed Mailers live at first with Fan’s family on Morris Avenue and then in Kingsley Court — a cluster of three large beach cottages at Beach and Ocean Avenues owned by Fan‘s parents and named after their new grandson Norman. Kingsley Court is the Mailer family’s primary residence from January 1923 through the fall 1928 move to Brooklyn (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 343), and the summertime center of Mailer family life through the 1930s. J. Michael Lennon‘s compiled list of Mailer’s residences (January 2006) gives the same two addresses, Morris Avenue and then Kingsley Court, but dates the Long Branch years 1922–25 and the move to Cortelyou Road in Flatbush to 1925 (Lennon, “Residences”); the two sources disagree by three years.
After 1928
After Ida Schneider‘s death on 28 May 1928 and Rabbi Schneider‘s on 22 November of the same year, the Mailers leave Long Branch for Cortelyou Road in Flatbush, Brooklyn. They continue, however, to summer in Long Branch for most of the 1930s — the 1935 summer, when Norman is twelve, is explicitly noted in Lennon as spent at “the hotels operated by his family in Long Branch”.
Mailer recalled the town in a 1966 interview with Edward Pell for the Red Bank Daily Register, “His Childhood Was a Happy Time” (66.15), which records that he summered there until 1941.
Long Branch in the work
Long Branch supplies the partial setting of Mailer’s unpublished first novel, No Percentage (1941; 408-page manuscript), set “in Long Branch and Brooklyn”. See 1941 for composition and the Greatest Thing context.
The Norman Mailer Society in Long Branch
Its tie to Mailer’s origins made Long Branch a natural site for the Norman Mailer Society‘s conferences: the 14th, “Return to Long Branch,” met there from 28 September to 1 October 2016, and the 19th, on “The Prisoner of Sex Turns 50,” from 8 to 10 June 2022. Mailer’s sister Barbara Mailer Wasserman gave a family keynote to the Society, printed as “Norman Mailer in Long Branch” in The Mailer Review 11.1 (2017).
Related pages
- pre-1923 | 1923 | 1928 | 1941 | 2016 | 2022
- Flatbush, Brooklyn | Brooklyn, New York | Norman Mailer Society | His Childhood Was a Happy Time: Norman Mailer Remembers Long Branch
- Isaac Barnett "Barney" Mailer | Fanny "Fan" Schneider Mailer | Hyman "Chaim" Jehuda Schneider | Ida "Chaje" Kamrass Schneider