At Least Arnold Learned From History

Jack Henry Abbott spent the nine years before his eighteenth birthday in Utah reformatories. He was free for six months, then he was sent to the Utah penitentiary to do time for writing bad checks. He got more felony time three years later when he stabbed one inmate to death and injured another in a prison brawl. He robbed a bank during a brief escape in 1971; that earned him a nineteen-year federal sentence on top of the state time. He was then twenty-five years old.

In 1978 Abbott began a lengthy correspondence with Norman Mailer, who was at the time writing The Executioner's Song (1979), a fictionalized biography of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer got some of Abbott's letters published in the prestigious New York Review of Books, which led to publication of Abbott's first book, In the Belly of the Beast (1982).

When Abbott came up for parole Mailer wrote a strong letter on his behalf, not only saying he was fit for release but that Mailer could guarantee him gainful employment in New York. Abbott was transferred to a New York halfway house in early in June 1981.

Diane Christian and I had done some research on Death Row in Texas not long before that and we were exchanging regular letters with several men on the Row. One of them read In the Belly of the Beast and wrote us that "they're the kind of letters somebody on the inside writes somebody on the outside who doesn't know jack-shit about the penitentiary and never will." He and several other men on the Row found the book's success in New York proof of how easily conned people in the free world were.

While Abbott was at the halfway house he was the darling of New York literary society. He was on "Good Morning, America," and went to fancy parties. I heard Mailer talk about him several times on tv and remember thinking, "You've found your own Gary Gilmore." Mailer had never gotten to meet Gary Gilmore and I'd always thought that rankled him: he was hired to work on Executioner's Song by Lawrence Schiller after Gilmore's execution and he based his Gilmore dialog on Schiller's extensive interview tapes.

With Abbott, he had his own his pet convict. It was like those people who get a big animal you're not supposed to have and show it to you on a leash with a jewel-encrusted collar. You don't know if you're supposed to admire the animal or them for having it on the leash with the jewel-encrusted collar. Well, yes, you do know.

If Abbott had stayed out of trouble for eight weeks, he would have gone on parole. He didn't make it. Six weeks after he got to New York, he stabbed to death a waiter named Richard Adan. Because of his previous record, Abbott received the maximum sentence: 15 years to life. After he went back to prison Abbott wrote a second book, My Return (1987).

Jack Henry Abbott hanged himself with a bedsheet and shoelace in Wende Correctional Faculty on Sunday, February 10, 2002.