Word: beast
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sort of life where a man could, if he wanted to, virtually disappear. Earlier this year, Norman Mailer had led a campaign to secure parole for Abbott, largely on the basis of his writing talent. His letters from prison, collected under the title In the Belly of the Beast, were released to fair critical acclaim. But the ex-convict seemed unable to handle his lionization or his freedom. Two months ago, Abbott got into an argument with a waiter in a New York City restaurant. The two men went outside, and moments later the young waiter was lying...
...this issue Reagan, who has slain the congressional dragons one after another, will face another kind of beast. The Air Force, which will run any new MX system, is dubious that the technical problems of an air-launch system can be solved in the time available. Texas Senator John Tower, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, is expressing his concern around Washington that each air-launched missile could cost $1 billion. He favors a variant of the land-based plan, which actually was begun under Republican Gerald Ford...
...offer and was stunned by the hard-edged eloquence of the self-educated Abbott, who boasted: "Nine-tenths of my vocabulary I have never heard spoken." Wrote Mailer: "I felt all the awe one knows before a phenomenon." He helped Abbott publish the letters; In the Belly of the Beast appeared to critical ovations in July. Then, by attesting to the convict's talent and promising him a job in New York, Mailer helped persuade the Federal Parole Board to release him last June. A $15,000 book advance paid three lawyers who handled his release...
...BELLY OF THE BEAST by Jack Henry Abbott...
...number of professional resisters, from the cast of Dostoyevsky's The Possessed and Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener to Camus's The Stranger. The letters of Convict Jack Abbott extend and ultimately strain that tradition. Part polemic, part existential survival manual, In the Belly of the Beast was culled from 1,000 pages of handwritten missives to Norman Mailer, then composing The Executioner's Song. Its message is brief, but it echoes like a slammed door in the corridors of maximum security...