Education of a Felon

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year
Winner of the McCallan Golden Dagger Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book

Edward Bunker's experiences in California's toughest prisons, on the mean streets of Los Angeles, and in Hollywood's seamy underworld have enabled him to write some of the grittiest, most affecting prison novels of our time. Quentin Tarantino called Bunker's Little Boy Blue "the best first-person crime novel I've ever read," while The New York Times said of his novel Dog Eat Dog, "Mr. Bunker has written a raw, unromantic, naturalistic crime drama more lurid than anything the noiresque Chandlers or Hammetts ever dreamed up."

Here, Bunker, who was sent to San Quentin (for the first time) at the age of seventeen, reveals the true stories of his life. Whether smoking a joint in a gas chamber chair, leaving fingerprints on a knife connected with a serial killer, or swimming in the Neptune Pool at San Simeon, Bunker delivers the goods. This is the real life and times a writer who has spent half his days living the harsh life—both inside and outside of prison—and the other half writing about it.