a book
In the Belly of the Beast
Jack Henry Abbott · 1991 · 166 pages
A visionary book in the repertoire of prison literature. When Normal Mailer was writing The Executioner's Song, he received a letter from Jack Henry Abbott, a convict, in which Abbott offered to educate him in the realities of life in a maximum security prison. This book organizes Abbott's by now classic letters to Mailer, which evoke his infernal vision of the prison nightmare.
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Will Self
“Abbott was the imprisoned murderer Norman Mailer befriended via mail correspondence and who murdered again after he’d won early release. Besides the Mailer-Abbott letters, this book contains an astonishing philosophical disquisition by the self-taught Abbott, who absorbed quantities of Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche while serving time.”↗