"One can feel the authentic spirit of Norman Mailer throughout the home. From his rocking chair, books and photographs that welcome all, to his personal libraries that stand throughout the house, writers can view, touch and feel the spirit of Mailer…. The real beauty of the home is that we writers can actually examine his office, access how he wrote and organized his files and bookshelves. This is a legacy that must be experienced firsthand. The Mailer Colony education in Provincetown is a transformative experience…."

– Jacqueline Miller Byrd, Greenbelt, Maryland

Just as students of architecture visit Frank Lloyd Wright's home, Taliesin West, in Arizona, to immerse themselves in the craft and sensibility of the eminent architect, America's young and mid- career writers find inspiration in what one Mailer Fellow called “the eternal ghost of Mailer.”

Among the homes of many great Americans that have been preserved for future generations to experience, are the residences of writers like John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Mark Twain.

Norman Mailer, considered one of America's most important writers in the second half of the twentieth century, worked and lived year-round, for the last three decades of his life, in a 5,000- square-foot red brick house in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The home which sits on Cape Cod Bay currently houses The Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony and all of its educational programs.

Provincetown has been an active arts colony for more than a century and only a few steps away from Mailer's home one finds the residences and studios of John dos Passos and Hans Hoffmann. Other artists and writers who lived and worked in Provincetown included Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Jackson Pollock, Charles W. Hawthorne, and Max Bohm.

In 2011, the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, a public non-profit for educational purposes, launched a Capital Campaign to purchase and preserve the Mailer Home. The Mailer family, which owns the home, has agreed to make the property available to the Center for a price below market value. Through monetary gifts to the Campaign and other initiatives, the Center will need to raise the $3.5 million required to complete the purchase by December 2012. The initiatives will be: 1) the sponsorship of library and reading rooms in the house; and 2) the sale of donated contemporary art. The art pieces, to be sold privately and at auction in May 2012 with the support of Phillips de Pury, already include generous gifts of works by renowned artists like Richard Prince, Chuck Close, Zeng Fanzhi, Matthew Barney, and Sebastiao Salgado.

In addition to housing all programs of the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony – resident fellowships, writing workshops, winter artists' retreats, lectures and readings – the Mailer Home preserves Mailer's third-floor writing studio and is the repository of his 4,000-volume personal library.  Hundreds of the volumes contain Mailer's own handwritten notes and observations. The library, as an archive of the author's intellectual growth since his early adulthood, will be a treasure trove for current and future scholars of his work just as the libraries of other literary luminaries have been. Three Reading Rooms will be established in the Mailer Home – for poetry, fiction and nonfiction – each of which will be sponsored by a patron of the Center.

Mailer, a writer of action much like Twain, fundamentally connected his skill and passion for writing with his engagement in the world around him. As a prolific and critically acclaimed author, Mailer was a leading public intellectual from the 1960s to his death in 2007. Among his most unique achievements was the prestige of being the only author ever to win Pulitzer Prizes both in fiction and in nonfiction.

Contact the Center's President for more information.