Before Jack Henry Abbott, there was Edgar Smith.

Abbott was a Utah forger, bank robber, and killer whose series of essay-letters to Norman Mailer about prison life were published by Random House in 1981, in a volume entitled In the Belly of the Beast. Abbott had come to Mailer’s attention a few years earlier when he learned that the novelist intended to write about Gary Gilmore, another self-publicizing Utah convict who had chosen to be executed rather than appeal his conviction for two murders.