Education of a Felon - by Edward Bunker (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

In Education of a Felon, the reigning champion of prison novelists finally tells his own story. The son of an alcoholic stagehand father and a Busby Berkeley chorus girl, Bunker was--at seventeen--the youngest inmate ever in San Quentin. His hard-won experiences on L.A.'s meanest streets and in and out of prison gave him the material to write some of the grittiest and most affecting novels of our time.
From smoking a joint in the gas chamber to leaving fingerprints on a knife connected to a serial kiler, from Hollywood's steamy undersde to swimming in the Neptune pool at San Simeon, Bunker delivers a memoir as colorful as any of his novels and as compelling as the life he's lead.

Review Quotes

"In this picaresque, harrowing, humorous yet deeply sad excursion through his dark-starred youth, Bunker--arguably the most renowned convict writer in America--serves as both participant and witness to the mid-century carnival of L.A. crime immortablized by James Ellroy...a thought-provoking and richly re-created tale of a career criminal." --Publishers Weekly

"Education of a Felon is a masterful summation of the hard and brutal life of crime and prison from which Edward Bunker chiseled the virogour prose that marks him as America's foremost chronicler of prison life..." --The Los Angeles Times

"Bunker writes in straight-ahead, unadorned prose and, refreshingly, he refrains from excessive psychologizing and sentimentalizing...a rough-hewn memoir by a rough-hewn man." --The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Edward Bunker's novels No Beast so Fierce and The Animal Factory were made into the movies Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman and Animal Factory with Edward Furlong. Bunker played Mr. Blue in Quentin Tarantin's Reservoir Dogs and was a cowriter of the screenplay for Runaway Train. Education of a Felon is his first nonfiction book. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.