142 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn
Mailer's four-story Brooklyn Heights brownstone overlooking New York Harbor, purchased in 1960 and his principal residence from late spring 1962 until his death in 2007.
142 Columbia Heights is a four-story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights that Mailer purchased in 1960 (the year of the Adele stabbing and the subsequent psychiatric commitment), and into which he moved in late spring 1962 with his third wife Lady Jeanne Campbell after their 4 May 1962 marriage. The published Lennon Days (p. 13) characterizes the move precisely: “in late spring they move into 142 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, a four-story brownstone he had purchased in 1960. Mailer lives there continuously until his death, except for sojourns in Provincetown, where he will live the majority of his time during the last decade of his life.”
The Columbia Heights house — a top-floor writing study, the harbor and the Manhattan skyline visible across the East River — is the workspace for nearly every Mailer book from The Presidential Papers (1963) forward. The site recurs implicitly across the corpus and explicitly in the autobiographical asides of the 1970s collections.
Stub; to be expanded as the long Brooklyn residence is documented across subsequent ingests.