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 1983, his year-round home until his death in 2007.
Mailer’s attachment to Provincetown begins in the summer of 1946, when he and Bea 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 year-round home 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).
Related pages
- 1946 | 1962 | The Naked and the Dead | Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out | Tough Guys Don’t Dance | Lady Jeanne Campbell
Referenced by 50
Works
- 50 Years Later, Reconsidering Norman Mailer's Wild, Bloody Provincetown Noir
- Author Norman Mailer is Colorful in Court
- Installment VIII: At the Lion and the Serpent
- Interview with Norman Mailer
- Introduction to Blue Nights: Photographs
- Massachusetts vs. Mailer
- Norman Mailer Cleared: Not Drunk
- Norman Mailer's Provincetown: The Wild West of the East
- Superman Comes to the Supermarket
- The Dumb and Joyful Masses
- The Ghosts of Tough Guys Don't Dance
- The Write Place
- To Mailer, Joyce Was 'a Wild Sound Track'
- Tough Guys Don't Dance
- US Writer Norman Mailer Wins Top France Prize
- When Kurt Vonnegut Met Norman Mailer in Cape Cod's Legendary "Helltown"
- Where Nothing Is Felt