For A&E, Adam Janos returns to the Jack Henry Abbott affair, the episode that remains the hardest case against Norman Mailer’s romance with the outlaw. Abbott (1944–2002) had spent almost his entire life inside institutions — reform school, then prison, where he killed a fellow inmate — when he began writing to Mailer in the late 1970s. Mailer was then deep in The Executioner’s Song, and Abbott offered himself as a native guide to the country Mailer was mapping: violence, incarceration, the machinery of the death house. Mailer was floored. “I felt all the awe one knows before a phenomenon,” he wrote. “Abbott had his own voice.”
Mailer did more than admire. He lobbied for Abbott’s parole, placed his letters in print, and guaranteed him work as a research assistant. When In the Belly of the Beast appeared in 1981, the reviews seemed to vindicate the gamble: Terrence Des Pres, in the New York Times, found “an exceptional literary gift.” Abbott left prison that year a literary celebrity.
Six weeks later he was a killer again. Before dawn on July 18, 1981, outside the Binibon café on the Lower East Side, Abbott stabbed Richard Adan — twenty-two years old, an actor and playwright, newly married, working the night shift in his father-in-law’s restaurant — to death, over the use of a bathroom. At the trial Mailer would not recant. “Culture is worth a little risk,” he said, a sentence that has trailed him ever since. Abbott was given fifteen years to life; he hanged himself in his cell in February 2002. Adan never turned twenty-three.
Janos is careful not to let the literary glamour eclipse the dead man, and neither should we. The affair is the permanent counterweight to everything seductive in Mailer’s fascination with the criminal voice — the same fascination that, turned on Gary Gilmore, produced the book that made at least one reader rethink capital punishment. The Society has sat with this before: in 2019 we marked John J. Lennon’s reckoning in the New York Review of Books, written from inside Sing Sing, which asked what Mailer’s patronage actually did for Abbott and what it cost Adan. The honest answer is the one Mailer spent the rest of his life not quite giving. Culture was not worth this risk — and the epigram that claimed it was is a bill his legacy is still paying.