My Return is sure to provoke intense public discussion and controversy. The author, Jack Henry Abbott, is now serving a fifteen-years-to-life sentence for the 1981 stabbing of Richard Adan, a young night manager of the Binibon Cafe on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Only six weeks before killing Adan, Abbott had been paroled from Marion Federal Prison in Illinois at the age of thirty-seven. While in prison, he had become well known as a promising writer, encouraged in his work by Norman Mailer and other New York literati. Abbott's In the Belly of the Beast was released at the time of his...