1981

The Jack Henry Abbott year. In June Mailer writes the introduction to and helps arrange Random House's publication of In the Belly of the Beast, and his advocacy helps win Abbott's parole; on 18 July, six weeks after his release, Abbott stabs and kills the 22-year-old actor Richard Adan, and Mailer is savaged in the press for his sponsorship. Alongside the catastrophe: Mailer plays Stanford White in Milos Forman's Ragtime, publishes a capital-punishment essay in Parade, and gives a run of interviews on the writing life.

Norman Mailer, 1981

Winter–spring — the writing life

The year opened on the writing life. Mailer sat for a run of interviews — Hilary Mills’s major Saturday Review conversation (81.2), Scott Parkin’s Esquire piece conducted while shopping for a BMW (81.3), Paul Attanasio’s Boston Phoenix interview (81.6), and the Columbia University seminar moderated by Joseph McElroy (81.7) — and published two essays that would prove seeds of later work: “Until Dead: Thoughts on Capital Punishment” (81.5), his first appearance in Parade, drawn from the experience of writing The Executioner’s Song; and “A Sinister Occupation” (81.9), on the “spooky” psychology of writing, the foundation of his 1985 essay “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.”

June — In the Belly of the Beast

Late June — Mailer wrote the introduction to, and helped arrange Random House‘s publication of, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison (81.10), the prison writing of the convict Jack Henry Abbott, with whom he had been corresponding since his work on The Executioner’s Song. The introduction appeared first in the New York Review of Books on 11 June, billed “A Vision of Hell” on the cover. Mailer’s was one of several literary voices — to the parole board and in print — attesting to Abbott’s gift, and in June Abbott was released on parole. The book and the release were widely covered, Mailer quoted throughout (81.11, 81.12).

In the Belly of the Beast first-edition jacket (Random House, 1981)

18 July — the killing of Richard Adan

18 July — Six weeks after his release, Abbott stabbed and killed Richard Adan, a 22-year-old actor and waiter, outside a restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He fled the city; M. A. Farber’s front-page New York Times report (81.13) traced his flight and quoted Mailer’s 1980 letter to Utah authorities on his behalf. Mailer was attacked across the media for his sponsorship of Abbott, who was captured, tried, and convicted; Mailer attended the 1982 trial and called the affair “a tragedy all around.” The episode would weigh on him for the rest of his life.

Fall — Ragtime, and a family year

In November and December the newly released Ragtime, directed by Milos Forman, put Mailer on screen as the architect Stanford White — a role he discussed in Vogue (81.18) and the Boston Globe (81.19), reflecting ruefully on the money he had once lost making his own films. He gave Barbara Probst Solomon a long Provincetown interview for El País (81.16), traded jokes with Barbara Bush at a New York Public Library benefit (81.17), and sat for his most extensive interview on sex and pornography (81.23).