Many of the world’s most important historical figures were imprisoned for holding unpopular or unorthodox beliefs. They used their time behind bars to write books that shaped the course of history. This collection of new essays offers a wide-ranging examination of influential works written—in whole or in part—while their authors were in prison or exile. Each chapter explores a different text and contains a brief biography and summary of the circumstances surrounding the author’s imprisonment, along with a critical examination of the writing and its legacy. Authors covered include Plato, Thomas Paine, Gandhi, Thoreau, Bertrand Russell, Hitler and Martin Luther King, Jr.

J. Ward Regan, Ph.D., has taught history and philosophy at New York University’s Liberal Studies program since 1993, and has lectured widely on American and European history through the New York Council for the Humanities. He lives in Brooklyn.

Edited by J. Ward Regan
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 268
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2015
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7803-3
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1970-5
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments vi

Preface (J. Ward Regan) 1

Introduction (J. Ward Regan) 5

Socrates’ Trial and Death by Execution (Farzad Mahootian) 17

Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy: Why Do the Innocent Suffer? (Heidi White) 34

Poetic Justice: The Civilization of the Heart in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Stephanie Kiceluk) 46

A Prisoner of Circumstance: Cervantes, Don Quixote and Literary ­Self-Authorship in the Early Modern Period (Sean Eve) 62

Thomas Paine and The Age of Reason (J. Ward Regan) 78

Thoreau’s Rhetoric of Resistance (Peter Diamond) 93

Epistle from Prison: Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis [Epistola in Carcere et Vinculis] (Joseph J. Portanova) 107

Bertrand Russell, World War I and Analytic Philosophy (Phil Washburn) 123

His Majesty’s Hotels: Gandhi’s Satyagraha in South Africa (Martin F. Reichert) 138

Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India: The Writing of History, Fighting for Freedom in Ahmandnager Jail (Tilottama Tharoor) 153

Drifter’s Escape: Adolf Hitler and the Writing of Mein Kampf (Rolf Wolfswinkel) 167

Antonio Gramsci’s The Prison Notebooks: A Humanist Reconstruction of Marxism (Brendan Hogan) 180

Jean Genet: Our Lady of the Flowers in Prison (Afrodesia E. McCannon) 192

In the Shadows of Prison: Sayyid Qutb’s Visions of a Perfect World (Peter C. Valenti) 204

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and ­Non-Violent Social Transformation (Joyce Apsel) 230

About the Contributors 247

Index 249