Edward Bunker is one of a small handful of American writers who have created authentic literature out of their experiences as criminals and prisoners. Now sixty-five years old, Bunker has been out of prison since 1975, but before that time he spent nearly all of the years of his life, except those of his earliest childhood, behind bars. That is to say, until his early forties Bunker was far better acquainted with incarceration as a way of life than he was with even limited freedom. That this career, so practically devoid of any of the normal inducements toward education and self-realization, could have produced writing of any kind is most unusual; that it yielded not only No Beast So Fierce but three other novels of genuine literary achievement (so far) is astonishing, placing Edward Bunker among the tiny band of American prisoner-writers whose work possesses integrity, craftsmanship, and moral passion in sufficient measure to claim our serious attention. In order to understand the nature of Bunker's extraordinary accomplishments, it is necessary to recount some of the details of his life, which was one of deprivation and violence, indeed, an existence so close to nihilism -- at least in the mind of the bourgeois reader -- as to make almost totally implausible any idea of creativity or the eventual blossoming of a literary career.

Bunker was born and reared in, of all places, Hollywood, California. Unlike the majority of American criminals, he was born white. His father was a stagehand in legitimate theaters around Los Angeles and occasionally found employment in the movie studios -- he once worked for the Hal Roach organization during the filming of the famous Our Gang comedies. His mother was a professional dancer and performed as a chorus girl in Busby Berkeley movies. Alcoholism drove Bunker's father into a state hospital and the couple was divorced when Eddie was four. Exacerbated by the hard times of the Great Depression, the boy's life followed the pattern of so many others that are the product of alcoholism and broken families. He was in and out of foster homes and military schools, from which he began to run away with determination augmented by an obstinate antiauthoritarian streak well developed even at that early age. At eleven he was committed briefly to Camarillo State Hospital for observation, and a year later he was sent to the juvenile reform school at Whittier. He made his escape, and when caught was sent to a much tougher school designed for unruly boys four or five years older. Here he spent a year or so and at fourteen was paroled. Twenty-nine days into freedom he was caught trying to rob a liquor store and was shot (though not seriously wounded) by the owner. This crime gained Bunker a sentence to the youth prison at Lancaster, even though he was considerably younger than the legally mandated age of eighteen to twenty-five. Throughout this period, Bunker was consistently thrown into an environment with older criminals. After having stabbed a guard at Lancaster, he was taken to the Los Angeles County Jail, where at fifteen he was placed in the tank reserved for notorious cases. His companions included several murderers awaiting the death penalty. Because of his age, and because his lawyer, the celebrated Al Matthews, who took the case pro bono, was able to show that correctional officers had abused Bunker on prior occasions, the judge deemed him too young for San Quentin and gave him a county jail sentence with probation. Proceedings were suspended. He was set free.

It was while he was briefly at large that Eddie was befriended by Mrs. Hal Wallis, wife of the renowned film producer (Casablanca, Becket, and many others) and herself a onetime comedienne in Mack Sennett's Keystone Comedies. Louise Fazenda Wallis made efforts to steer Eddie in the direction of probity and worthiness, but her concern came to naught. His friends, except for Louise Wallis, were reform school graduates and confirmed professional criminals. Bunker, now sixteen, began selling marijuana and was enthusiastically engaged in boosting (professional shoplifting) and learning to play short con games such as "The Match," "The Strap," and "Laying the Note." He was delivering some marijuana when a pair of detectives flagged him down. A wild chase ensued through Los Angeles streets; the automobile he was driving caromed off three cars and hit a mail truck head-on before he was captured. The judge was still unwilling to send a sixteen-year-old to San Quentin and gave him a year in the county jail and more probation. He promptly escaped.

At this point Bunker's luck ran out. Rather, the calendar said he was seventeen-- still not eighteen, but old enough. For the escape and the assault on the Lancaster guard, he was sentenced to two concurrent six-month-to-ten-year terms, and he was sent to San Quentin.

It was during the four-and-a-half-year stay at San Quentin that Bunker discovered books and began to read and write. Louise Wallis sent him a Royal portable typewriter and a subscription to the New York Times Sunday edition and Book Review. In his excited exploration of literature, he became a voracious reader, absorbing four or five books a week, ranging from a two-volume Military History of the Western World to collections of short stories from The New Yorker to novels by Thomas Wolfe, Faulkner, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Dostoevsky-- and others equally or less celebrated. He also wrote a novel, which he later regarded as very bad, and many short stories, all unpublished.

When released on parole, he returned to the outside world with serious intentions of going straight, and once again he was taken under the wing of Louise Wallis, who obtained a job for her protégé at a nearby boys' home, where she was the foremost benefactress; there he was employed as a combination chauffeur of boys, pool supervisor, study hall tutor, and counselor. Unfortunately, his protector began suffering severe depression and became dysfunctional, and Bunker lost his only anchor in a precarious world. Now twenty-three, he tried to obtain such legitimate jobs as story analyst or reader at various movie studios, but because of his criminal record he had no luck. Realizing that he had been not only locked up, but locked out of society, he resolved, as he has said, "to get by on my wits," which at first meant selling used sports cars as a front while planning crimes in the back. He conceived schemes for robberies that were executed by others. "These guys were heisting liquor stores on impulse," he recalls. "I laid things out so they could make some money." He also planned to organize Hollywood call girls by extorting the pimps and madams to pay him protection. He lived this way for four years. By then he had drifted away from his relationship with Louise Wallis. Finally, caught in a forgery and check-passing scheme, he was sentenced once again to San Quentin for an indeterminate term of six months to fourteen years. This was Bunker's longest imprisonment, and one that did not terminate until he had served seven years. During this period he continued to read widely and to write with passion and amazing industry, producing four unpublished novels and many short stories. Lacking the money for postage, he often sold his blood to make up the needed amounts to send the stories to magazines. He recalls this interlude as one of near madness -- so long was the sentence in terms of the crime, forgery usually being considered a minor felony. Worst of all, the sentence was meted out a year at a time, so he never knew whether he would be paroled in six months or six years, or anything in between.

Bunker's work deals largely with the rage and frustration one feels when, on release from prison, he faces at best the indifference -- and at worst the hatred and hostility -- of the outside world. One of the sharpest memories Bunker retains of that time is how, after years of wearing the ample prison brogans, his new dressout shoes caused severe blistering of his feet. He wrote over two hundred letters in application for legitimate jobs -- but received not a single answer, his prison record acting effectively as his curse. Such is the fate of most ex-convicts in America, for whom the expiation of sin through incarceration does not usually serve, in the eyes of society, as meaningful redemption. A true outcast, Bunker fell once again into crime. One night, after having burglarized a floor safe in a bar, he was arrested following a high-speed automobile chase.

At the moment of arrest, he feigned insanity, claiming he was born in 1884 and that he had warned Roosevelt about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During the arraignment, he told the judge that the Catholic Church was trying to put a radio in his brain. Proceedings were suspended pending a psychiatric hearing. The psychiatrists who examined Bunker found him to be an "acute, chronic schizophrenic paranoid with auditory hallucinations and delusions of persecution." So successful was this ruse that he was sent to the prison at Vacaville, where he was deemed a high-security risk, a threat Bunker was at pains to exploit by taking every opportunity he could to loudly babble at the walls.

Eventually returned to Los Angeles for trial on the safe burglary charge, he made bail and remained free for a year. While on the streets, he shuttled back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco, managing what he now refers to as a "little drug empire." At this point, to augment his income, he decided to rob a prosperous little Beverly Hills bank. The ensuing series of coincidences might have possessed comic overtones had the outcome not been so dire. Unknown to him, Bunker's car, at the time he set out to rob the bank, had been secretly wired with a radio device by narcotics agents, who expected the "beeper" to allow them to trail their dupe to a drug transaction. Bunker, however, armed and prepared to commit a robbery, and now followed in his car not only by motorized agents but also by a helicopter, led the officers to the very door of the bank, where pandemonium ensued as the thwarted robber was suddenly recognized, pursued, and, after a long chase by car, caught at gunpoint and severely beaten. This time the outlook was truly grim. He tried suicide. A three-time loser, Bunker was sentenced to five years for the bank robbery and six years for drug conspiracy, the terms to run concurrently.

There our story might have ended -- that of another wretched misfit swallowed up in the living death of institutional retribution-- were it not for the saving grace of art. For it must be remembered that even during his life of crime Bunker had toiled at being a writer. His first novel, No Beast So Fierce, was accepted for publication while he was awaiting trial.

He was now in the federal penal system because of the bank robbery and narcotics charges, and found himself packed off to serve his time at the McNeil Island federal penitentiary in Puget Sound, Washington. While there, he once again displayed his antiauthoritarian rage and refused to let himself be housed in a ten-man cell. For this revolt he was transported to the most fearsome prison in America, the hulking lockup at Marion, Illinois, which supplanted Alcatraz as the fortress where the nation confines its worst felons, a place in which six hundred guards oversee three hundred inmates. Still, while imprisoned in this place, Bunker continued to write. His second novel, The Animal Factory, was completed there. (A third novel, Little Boy Blue, appeared in 1982, and a fourth, Dog Eat Dog, in 1996.) Meanwhile, and most importantly in terms of his writing career and his eventual fate, the year 1973 saw the publication of No Beast So Fierce; it was received with excellent reviews and considerable attention. It should be pointed out, however, that by this time Bunker was already a prison legend and his fame had extended to the outside world. He had written angry articles for The Nation. A searing essay he had penned concerning the racial crisis in American prisons had been featured in Harper's Magazine and announced prominently on its cover; its thesis -- that the irreconcilable enmity between blacks and whites in prison would certainly lead to catastrophe -- was a warning that evoked wide concern. This article and the publication of No Beast So Fierce were instrumental in gaining his parole in 1975. He has serenely remained outside prison walls in the years since.

Bunker presently lives with his wife in Los Angeles, where he continues to write fiction and where he has obtained notable success as a screenwriter. In 1978, No Beast So Fierce was made into a film entitled Straight Time, starring Dustin Hoffman. The film was not a commercial success and suffered critical neglect, rather mysteriously, since it is a taut and exceedingly well-made work which explores the themes of crime and punishment with great insight. In 1985, Bunker was coauthor of the screenplay of The Runaway Train, a gripping drama about escaped felons from an Alaska prison; it was a critical and commercial hit and gained Oscar nominations for its stars, Jon Voight and Eric Roberts. Now, in 1999, filming has been completed for Bunker's The Animal Factory. Bunker has adapted well to civilian life after his many years of violence and desperation. His attitude and demeanor bespeak the composure of a man who is at peace with himself after a lifetime of existential dread such as the average law-abiding citizen can only distantly imagine. Of medium height, compact and muscular, he still has a tough and streetwise expression, the face of a man who has known cruelty and suffering; but his eyes twinkle; the initial appearance of ferocity is softened by a quality both wise and benign. Reserved, almost shy in manner, he can become animated and powerfully articulate; his intellectual ability, which possesses scope as well as nimbleness, is all the more impressive for being the product of passionate self-education. The letters he writes-- and he writes dozens out of the habit formed in the loneliness of prison cells-- are splendid models of the epistolary art, shrewd, discursive, witty, beautifully expressed, and often profound. Edward Bunker was dealt a rotten hand at the beginning of his life, and his days thereafter were largely those of a victim in society's brutalizing institutions. That he emerged from these dungeons not a brute but an artist with a unique and compelling voice is a tribute to his own invincible will, besides being a sweet victory by the artist himself over society and its contempt for the outcast. In his work readers will be able to discover urgent truths about crime and punishment -- and therefore about our ultimate concern with freedom -- set down by a vigorous and important writer.

-- William Styron