Today's Birthdays

one click shows all of today's celebrity birthdays

Browse All Birthdays

43,625    Actors
27,931    Actresses
4,867    Composers
7,058    Directors
842    Footballers
221    Racing drivers
925    Singers
9,111    Writers

Get FamousLikeMe on your website
One line of code gets FamousLikeMe on your website. Find out more.

Subscribe to Daily updates


Add to Google

privacy policy



Famous Like Me > Actor > A > Jack Abbott

Profile of Jack Abbott on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Jack Abbott  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 18th November 1886
   
Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois, USA
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Jack Henry Abbott (January 21, 1944 - February 10, 2002) was an American criminal and author. He was released from prison after gaining praise for his writing and lauded by a number of high profile literary critics, but almost immediately he committed a murder and was locked up for the rest of his life.

He was born on a U.S. Army base in Michigan to an American soldier and a Chinese prostitute. Abbott was in trouble with teachers and later the law as a child and by the age of sixteen he was sent to a reform school.

Prison and release

In 1965, aged twenty-one, Jack Abbott was serving a sentence for forgery in a Utah prison when he stabbed a fellow inmate to death. He was given a sentence of three-to-twenty-years for this offence, and in 1971 his sentence was increased by a further nineteen-years after he escaped and committed a bank robbery in Colorado. Behind bars he was troublesome and refused to obey guard's orders and spent a lot of time solitary confinement.

In 1977 he read that author Norman Mailer was writing about convicted killer Gary Gilmore. Abbott wrote to Mailer and offered to write about his time behind bars and the conditions he was in. Mailer agreed and helped to publish In the Belly of the Beast, Abbott's book on life in the prison system consisting of his letters to Mailer.

Mailer supported Abbot's attempts to gain parole, which were successful in June 1980 when Abbott was released. He went to New York City and was the toast of the literary scene for a short while.

Returned to prison

On the morning of July 18, just six weeks after getting out of prison, Jack Abbott got into a row with 22-year-old Richard Aden in a restaurant in Manhattan. Aden was a waiter and refused to let Abbott go through the kitchen to take a short-cut to the restroom. The short-tempered Abbott stabbed Aden in the chest, killing him. The very next day, unaware of Abbott's crime, the New York Times ran a positive review of The Belly of the Beast.

After some time on the run, Abbot was arrested and charged with murdering Richard Aden. At his trial in January 1982 he was convicted of manslaughter and given fifteen-years-to-life.

Norman Mailer was subjected to some criticism for his role in getting Jack Abbott released and was accused of being so blinded by Abbott's evident talent for writing that he did not take into account Abbott's propensity for violence. In a 1992 interview in Buffalo News Mailer said that his involvement with Abbott was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in."

Apart from the advance fee of $12,500, Abbot did not receive any profits from The Belly of the Beast as Richard Aden's widow successfully sued him for $7.5 million in damages, which meant she received all the money from the book's sales.

Final years

In 1987 Abbott released another book titled My Return which was not a success. It contained a great deal of self-pity, but no remorse for his crimes. In fact Abbott blamed his crimes on the prison system and the government and said he wanted an apology from society for the way he had been treated.

He appeared before the parole board in 2001 but his application was turned down due to his failure to express remorse and his lengthy criminal record and disciplinary problems in prison.

On February 10, 2002, Jack Abbott hanged himself in his prison cell using a make-shift noose constructed from his bed-sheets and shoelaces. He left a suicide note but the contents of it have not been made public.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Jack Abbott