The writer William Styron once observed that there was very little terra incognita, when it came to what an author could write about with authority, regardless of his or her own personal experiences.
A man who has never been to war can, after diligent research, write with authority about the horrors of war (see Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, a work so convincing in its details that when aging veterans of the Civil War read it, many were keen to track down its author; imagine their shock when they encountered a man so young that he hadn’t been born until after the war was over and done!).
Mario Puzo had never been in the mafia, but after a reputed decade’s worth of research in the New York City Public Library, he wrote The Godfather, which would go on to be adapted into one of the greatest American films in history.
At this point the reader might be wondering: is there an area where this rule does not hold, an experience that one would have had to endure personally before writing about it convincingly? If a writer can bluff his or her way through war and crime, what can’t they write about without having first lived it?
Styron’s answer to that (which I agree with) involves the prison milieu. To be frank, the best books about the prison experience have been written by people who have lived it firsthand. There are many good, even great books, about doing hard time written by people who’ve never seen the inside of rock walls, but they pale next to the works of those who have done time themselves.
Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is good; John Cheever’s Falconer is brilliant, but neither holds a candle to Edward Bunker’s No Beast So Fierce.
I’ve notice that Rob (and many of his commenters) have more than a passing fascination with prison. In the spirit of perhaps quenching some of that curiosity, I have compiled a list of what I believe are the ten most fascinating books written about prison. Some of them are written by men who’ve done time, and some of them aren’t. Here, without further ado, are my personal ten favorite books about the Big House:
Stone City by Mitchell Smith: A college professor gets a DUI, killing a young girl with his car. He is sent to the state pen, where he begins to teach convicts to read. This book could have easily descended into the clichéd teacher-in-the-hood category, familiar from movies like Dangerous Minds, but it becomes an incredibly convincing whodunit, which is something one rarely sees depicted in prison.
Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr by James Carr. One of the most brutal, unsentimental pieces of writing I’ve ever encountered. Carr was a young black man who grew up in the gang culture of Southern California in the early and late sixties. He makes no excuses for his actions, whether he’s bludgeoning someone to death with a baseball bat or raping a fellow inmate.
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover: Conover was never a convict, but was rather a journalist with a set of balls the size of church bells. When he wanted to know what it was like to sneak across the border from Mexico into the United States, he linked up with some coyotes and he made the journey. And when he wanted to know what prison was all about, he applied to be a guard at Sing Sing, completed his training regimen, and then he proceeded to work a year as a “bull.” Conover is incredibly compassionate without ever being mawkish or melodramatic.
Tattoo the Wicked Cross by Floyd Salas: This one might be a little too much for most readers. It deals with a fair-skinned Hispanic boy who is sent to a charnel house of a reform school, ruled over by a ruthless black teenaged bully named “The Buzzer” who wears a set of leather black gloves and “stings” (re: rapes) “paddy boys” (Caucasians) for their “punk honey.” Incredibly disturbing, but remarkable that the taboo of teenaged male-on-male rape was broken open in such a brave way, and several decades ago, too.
Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars by Kenneth Hartman: When Kenneth Hartman was a young man, he made a very tragic, stupid decision. He got drunk, high, and he beat a homeless man to death in a park in Los Angeles. That decision cost him his freedom, but there isn’t an ounce of self-pity in this book. Hartman is an autodidactic philosopher, whose wisdom and serenity pours across every page of this book.
The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison by Pete Earley. If you’re only going to read one of the books on this list, let it be this one. The most compulsively readable book ever written about prison, Earley’s book follows several cons as they try to survive and navigate fed pen culture, but the most fascinating character in the work is Tommy Silverstein, a shot-caller in a white gang who is notorious for his murder of a prison guard, which has resulted in him being kept in a lighted cell twenty-four hours per day.
Silverstein is still alive (but nearly blind from the incessant fluorescence) and he is something of a brilliant artist. His story would require far more space than I’ve allotted him here, but if you are interested in reading about the injustices done this man, here would be a good place to start:
You’ve Got Nothing Coming: Notes from a Prison Fish by Jimmy Lerner: If you’re a nice middle-class Jewish boy who ever wondered what it was like to share a cell with a Neo-Nazi skinhead, wonder no more! Depressing books about the penitentiary are pretty much par for the course. What saves this book is its cynical, relentless sense of humor.
No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker: Bunker was, without a doubt, the greatest writer to ever emerge from the ranks of hardened criminals. He led a strange life, being first adopted by the wife of a movie mogul who took him to meet everyone William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon to Aldous Huxley, but crime was in his blood, and he went from reform school to juvenile detention to eventually San Quentin, where he held the record as the youngest inmate to ever be incarcerated there. Miraculously, Bunker went on to have a second life as a screenwriter and actor (he was Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs). All of his books are good, but this one is the best.
Fish by T.J. Parsell: The saddest book ever written about prison, sadder even than Tattoo the Wicked Cross. Parsell was a seventeen year-old lanky white kid with long hair and a charming smile. He decided to flirt with a girl at the local photo-mat by holding her up with a toy pistol, but his act backfired and he got a bid in a hardcore “gladiator school.” He was raped repeatedly, but eventually linked up with a hardened gay prisoner who refused to be victimized, and he learned to stand up for himself.
No Escape: Male Rape in US Prisons by Joan Mariner: This was written as a Human Rights Watch Report, and while it’s not much of a narrative, it is an eye-opening document that sheds light on the racial nature of caste and abuse inside America’s prisons. Various convicts were urged to write their own accounts of what happens in prison, and their letters are presented, unvarnished and unedited, for the reader to see. Obviously it is brutal, but it sheds light on why men are willing to join racist gangs in order to survive and avoid victimization while doing time.
Well, that’s ten, but I’d like to give an honorable mention to Eddie Little. Little wrote two good novels, Another Day in Paradise and Steel Toes, the former of which adapted for the screen and starred James Woods and Melanie Griffith:
It is alleged that Little’s Another Day in Paradise provided James Frey with grist for his phony memoir about addiction and recovery. Sadly, Little is not here to defend himself or his work. He died of an overdose several years ago, which is a shame because he was a hell of a writer. His columns for LA Weekly are prime examples of why William Styron was right. Prison producers very few great writers, but the ones who emerge from that hell bring the kinds of stories that the MFA crowd just cannot bring. Little’s How to Rob a Drug Dealer is a good place to start:
