66896X1 Second Printing. Random House, New York: 1981. 167 pages. Hardcover with dustjacket. Good condition. In the middle of writing The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer received a letter from a federal prisoner named Jack H. Abbott who wanted to warn him that very few people knew much about the violence in prisons and who offered to clarify some aspects of Gary Gilmore's life. Mailer began to correspond with Abbott, and made a startling literary discovery: the convict's direct, intense prose was decidedly powerful; his letters were extraordinary for their clarity, vividness and ferocity. In the Belly of the Beast brings together Abbott's letters to Mailer, edited and arranged according to: Abbott's background as a "state-raised" convict; the bizarre forms of punishment practiced in American prisons; the experience of long-term solitary confinement; the uses and abuses of sex and drugs in prison; the doomed relationship between inmates and guard; the complex behavior of prisoners among themselves; the political philosophy that Abbott has forged from his unique vantage point; his view on the American system of justice, parole and rehabilitation - and more. "We have before us the most intense, I might even say the most fiercely visionary book of its kind in the American repertoire of prison literature. In the Belly of the Beast is awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous; its impact is indelible, and as an articulation of penal nightmare it is completely compelling." - Terrence Des Pres, The New York Time Book Review $11.20USD
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