In Prison
Mailer's 389-word note prefacing Jack Henry Abbott's first published account of prison violence in the New York Review of Books - the public beginning of his sponsorship of Abbott, later In the Belly of the Beast.
“In Prison,” Mailer’s 389-word note in the New York Review of Books (26 June 1980) prefacing Jack Henry Abbott‘s first-hand account of the violence of American prisons. Abbott’s “writing impressed me as being as good as any convict’s prose I had read since Eldridge Cleaver,” Mailer wrote. The essay was the public start of Mailer’s sponsorship of Abbott: the account was revised for Abbott’s book In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, for which Mailer wrote an introduction (81.10), and Mailer helped win his parole. See the 1981 and 1982 entries.