![]() ![]() ![]() I would like to examine Abbott's work, and Mailer's advocacy of Abbott, to demonstrate that the latter was based on dubious premises, and that to some degree what is most important about Abbott's letters is the way in which they demonstrate the nature of the modern penitentiary as Erving Goffmann has described it - the "totalizing" institution. It is clear that Mailer hoped to do what Jean-Paul Sartre had done in France some four decades before, on behalf of the writer and convicted criminal Jean Genet: yet Mailer's attempt at a public role would backfire badly, when Abbott killed a restaurant worker in lower Manhattan on the day before the New York Times published its favorable review of In the Belly of the Beast. The book is comprised of letters sent originally to the novelist and chauvinist Norman Mailer, in an effort to give Mailer some corroborative detail for his non-fiction book about death-row inmate Gary Gilmore Mailer, who described Abbott as a "phenomenon" for his articulate prose, then led a push to have Abbott paroled from prison. Jack Henry Abbot's In the Belly of the Beast is an unusual literary document. ![]()
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