Jack Henry Abbott
American convict and writer; he began corresponding with Mailer in 1977 while researching The Executioner's Song. Mailer championed his prison letters as In the Belly of the Beast (1981) and helped win his 1981 parole - weeks after which Abbott killed a young waiter, Richard Adan, a tragedy that haunted Mailer for the rest of his life.
Jack Henry Abbott, a convict who had spent most of his life in prison, began writing to Mailer in 1977 — offering, from the inside, to inform Mailer’s research for The Executioner’s Song about the realities of incarceration. Mailer met him in person at the Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois in early November 1979. In June 1980 Mailer brought Abbott’s prose before the public for the first time, prefacing an excerpt of his prison writing in the New York Review of Books (“In Prison,” 80.9): Abbott’s writing, he said, was “as good as any convict’s prose I had read since Eldridge Cleaver.” Struck by that force, Mailer shepherded the letters into print as In the Belly of the Beast (81.10), for which he wrote the introduction, and supported his parole that year. Six weeks after his release, Abbott stabbed and killed a young actor and waiter, Richard Adan, outside a Manhattan restaurant — a catastrophe that drew fierce criticism of Mailer and weighed on him permanently.
Stub created during the 1979 ingest; the In the Belly of the Beast story is developed in the 1981 entries.
Related pages
- The Executioner’s Song (79.14) | 1979
- In Prison (80.9) | Introduction to In the Belly of the Beast (81.10)