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.
Mailer completes Barbary Shore in Putney, after drafting across New York, Provincetown, and Hollywood during 1949–1950. By the time the novel is published by Rinehart on 24 May 1951, Mailer has left Putney and Bea and is living in New York with Adele Morales (see 1951).
The house on Old Depot Road
The Mailers’ Putney house was on Old Depot Road, bought on 29 October 1950 (Lennon, “Residences”). J. Michael Lennon‘s compiled list of Mailer’s residences (January 2006) has Mailer living there only until March 1951: he separated from Bea that winter and from March to June lived with Adele Morales on Monroe Street in New York (Lennon, “Residences”), as the 1951 Days page also records. The published Days gives the Putney residence as running from October “to December 1951” but, in its entry for 1951, also has Mailer separating from Bea that winter and living with Adele in New York, first on Monroe Street and then on Pitt Street (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 349). The sources disagree on how long Mailer himself lived in Putney.