Word: conviction
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...work on a book about Gary Gilmore, a Utah inmate who was executed for murder in 1977. Abbott, who had spent all but 9½ months of his adult life in prison, offered to give the author a sense of "the atmospheric pressure" endured by long-term convicts like Gilmore. Mailer accepted the 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...
Others glimpsed the handwriting on the prison walls. Erroll McDonald, Abbott's editor at Random House and one of his guides in the complexities of free life -how to order from a menu, where to buy toothpaste-noticed the ex-convict's tendency to "interpret indifference as rudeness." Novelist Jerzy Kosinski, who had had his own correspondence with Abbott since 1973, said, "Looking at him, I had the feeling there could be uncontrollable anger one moment and a very easy embrace the next." Finally, anyone who read his work noticed, as Kosinski did, that "he wrote in such...
...county district court judge ruled yesterday that there was sufficient evidence to-convict University police chief Saul L. Chafin on a charge of assault, but decided instead to continue the case without a finding for a year...
Since the 19th century, literature has housed a 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...
Still, that hasty immunity grant will make it difficult to convict Cooke of any federal crime. So far, both military and FBI investigators seem convinced that Cooke, who had written his master's thesis at the College of William and Mary on nuclear weapons, and had twice been rejected for a job with the CIA, was merely trying to trade information with the Soviets in hopes of enhancing his self-image as a strategic weapons wizard. The case, said one investigator, is "bizarre...