Convict Doppelgangers

Abstract

Robert J. Begiebing reviews Jerome Loving’s Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (St. Martin’s Press), which traces the parallels between Jack Abbott and Gary Gilmore and Abbott’s role in the making of The Executioner’s Song. Begiebing praises the book’s research, pace, and treatment of American prison history and of Mailer’s debt to James T. Farrell, notes some repetition, and judges it better suited to the common reader than to the Mailer scholar. He closes with recollections of his own 1982 interview with Mailer and of teaching at Portsmouth Naval Prison.