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.

Mailer first came to Provincetown for a week in June 1943, with Bea, after his Harvard graduation. His attachment to the place begins in the summer of 1946, when the two rent a cottage in nearby North Truro and he starts his war novel. He would spend the greater part of most summers there for the next six decades. The town is the setting of the 1958 story “Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out” (58.4); from 1983 it became his second home, and in his last decade his only one, until his death in 2007. It is also the setting of the 1984 murder mystery Tough Guys Don’t Dance, whose opening pages are among the finest evocations of the off-season town in his work. The 1962 photograph above — by Ivan Massar — shows Mailer with his third wife Lady Jeanne Campbell and their poodle Tibo in Provincetown Harbor, the same summer that saw Mailer and Jeanne move into the Brooklyn brownstone at 142 Columbia Heights (late spring 1962).

Mailer’s Provincetown addresses

J. Michael Lennon‘s compiled list of Mailer’s residences (January 2006) gives the following Provincetown stays and houses (Lennon, “Residences”):

• 1943. A week in June.
• 1946. June to September at Crow’s Nest Cottages, North Truro.
• 1948, 1951, 1957–1959, 1963. Summers in town; in 1950 (May–September) the Mailers rented the home of Joseph Hawthorne.
• 1960. May to September at 1 Miller Hill Road, the mansion of Nicholas Wells.
• 1962. July to September at 535 Commercial Street, the summer after his marriage to Lady Jeanne Campbell.
• 1964–1969. Summers with Beverly Bentley and their sons: the Joseph Acker apartment in 1965 and, from 1966, their own house at 565 Commercial Street.
• 1969–1972. After the separation from Beverly, fall 1969 to April 1970 at 1 Miller Hill Road; from October 1970 to May 1972, with Carol Stevens, in the rented Lily Harmon house at 627 Commercial Street.
• 1977–1983. July visits (565 Commercial Street in 1977), then summer rentals of 627 Commercial Street in 1982 and 1983.
• 1983–2006. 627 Commercial Street, bought in October 1983. By the list’s account Mailer spent half the year or more in Provincetown from 1992 and lived there year-round from 1996.

The published Days states that from his 1983 purchase Mailer spent as much time in Provincetown as in Brooklyn (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 366), and describes him “now living full-time in Provincetown” in 2004 (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 376); the residence list shows a slower shift, with most of each year spent at 142 Columbia Heights until about 1991.

Related pages

• 1943 | 1946 | 1962 | 1966 | 1983 | 565 Commercial Street, Provincetown | 627 Commercial Street, Provincetown | 142 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn | The Naked and the Dead | Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out | Tough Guys Don’t Dance | Lady Jeanne Campbell

Cite as: /places/provincetown
Last updated: 2026-10-11