From the Shadows to the Spotlight
Abbott was born on January 21, 1944, in Michigan. He was in and out of the foster care system throughout the Midwest from early childhood onward before getting sent to juvenile detention in Utah at the age of 12. For the next several years, he was in and out of school. At 19, he robbed a store for some checks that he then tried to cash for himself, landing him his first bid in prison: a five-year stint at a federal penitentiary.
Three years into that term, he stabbed and killed a fellow inmate, earning him an additional three-to-20 years to his sentence.
It was during his time in a federal penitentiary in Utah that Abbott reached out to Mailer. Mailer, then working on his own exploration of the criminal mind for his book The Executioner’s Song, was immediately struck by the intensity of Abbott’s correspondence. Mailer saw not just a convict, but raw talent—a voice from the abyss that could offer a terrifyingly clear-eyed view of American brutality, later musing, “I felt all the awe one knows before a phenomenon. Abbott had his own voice. I had heard no other like it.'
In their correspondence, Abbott felt uncomfortable with the way that Mailer romanticized his life. “My life is not a 'saga,' and I resent your using the term like that,'' he wrote to Mailer. ''I do not feel 'heroic.'”
But he was still appreciative for the tutelage from one of America’s preeminent men of letters. And Mailer didn’t just give Abbott some attention: He took him under his literary wing and lobbied for his release, writing articles about Abbot’s literary gifts and guaranteeing him a job as a research assistant after he got out.
In 1981, Mailer’s advocacy bore fruit. Abbott was paroled and relocated to a halfway house in downtown Manhattan. Almost simultaneously, his memoir about prison life, In the Belly of the Beast, was published.
Critics gushed. In The New York Times, writer Terrence Des Pres called Abbott “an exceptional man with an exceptional literary gift,” further adding that “we must be grateful” to Mailer “for getting these letters into publishable form and—a job more difficult—for helping to get Abbott out on parole.”
Des Pres’s glowing review was published on July 19, 1981. But it was already dated before it even went to press: The day before, Abbott killed again. He’d been free for fewer than two months.
The Reckoning for Jack Henry Abbott's Supporters
On July 18, 1981, just past 5 a.m., Abbott entered the Binibon Cafe in New York City's East Village with two companions. He asked the restaurant’s manager, 22-year-old Richard Adan, if he could use the staff bathroom.
Like Abbott, Adan was an artist. An actor, dancer and playwright, he had toured France and Spain and was working on a play that was going to be produced by the La MaMa theater on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Like so many other young New York City creatives, he worked a “real job” in the service industry to support his creative pursuits.
Adan refused to let Abbott into the staff bathroom; the exchange spiraled. In the alleyway outside the cafe, Abbott stabbed Adan in the heart, ending his life almost instantly. He then fled the scene, leaving his companions in shock and the literary world in a state of sudden, violent reckoning.
Abbott’s subsequent arrest and 1982 trial became a media spectacle, attended by celebrities who had previously championed his cause. At the proceedings, Abbott called the murder “a tragic misunderstanding” brought about from the paranoia that he’d developed during his years of incarceration.
The judge, sentencing Abbott to 15 years to life, offered a somber indictment of the situation, blaming a system that "brutalizes rather than rehabilitates." At the trial, Mailer continued to defend Abbott, telling the press, “Culture is worth a little risk.”
Abbott spent the rest of his life behind bars, dying by suicide in February 2002 at the age of 58 while serving his sentence for Adan’s murder at the Wende Correctional Facility in New York. He had been denied parole in August 2001.
