"I'm the only guy who ever robbed a bank and thought about writing about it as I was robbing!" chuckles Edward Bunker, the most successful novelist and screenwriter San Quentin prison has ever produced. "You should write about what you know. And I've got lots of great material."

The oppressive conditions of the Big House are rarely conducive to illuminating prose, but for a rare handful who have toiled behind locked doors, the results are essential. From Socrates to de Sade, Chekhov to Caryl Chessman - not to mention the Russian giants, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - the work of prison writers has one common thread.