1. Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
2. Pilgrim’s Progress
by John Bunyan
3. Conversations with Myself
by Nelson Mandela
4. Le Morte d’Arthur
by Sir Thomas Malory
5. De Profundis
by Oscar Wilde
6. Our Lady of the Flowers
by Jean Genet
7. “To Althea, from Prison”
by Richard Lovelace
8. Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
by John Cleland
9. Justine
by the Marquis de Sade
10. A Hymn to the Pillory
by Daniel Defoe
11. Pisan Cantos
by Ezra Pound
12. The Travels of Marco Polo
by Rustichello da Pisa
13. Letters from Birmingham Jail
by Martin Luther King Jr.
14. Short Stories
by O. Henry
15. The Enormous Room
by e.e cummings
16. In the Belly of the Beast
by Jack Abbott
17. Civil Disobedience
by Henry David Thoreau
18. The 120 Days of Sodom
by Marquis DeSade
19. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn
20. On the Yard
by Malcolm Braly
21. Soul on Ice
by Eldridge Cleaver
22. The Historie of the World
by Walter Raleigh
23. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
by Ludwig Wittgenstein
24. Letters and Papers From Prison
by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
25. The Consolation of Philosophy
by Boethius
(If you have any other titles to add to this list, please mention in the comment section below. Thank you.)
Edward Bunker Education of a Felon (No Beast so Fierce fiction). Ken Kasey, William Burroughs, P.G Wodehouse. Jimmy Boyle, A Sense of Freedom. The Holocaust literature e.g. Victor E.Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning. Primo Levi, If This is a Man. Sarah Helm If This is a Woman. Edith Egar, The Choice, Andre Schwarz-Bart (fiction) The Last of the Just. Art Spieglman, Maus. Russian novels eg. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward. Irina Ratushinskya, Grey is the Color of Hope. Fyodor Dostoevsky (fiction) Crime and Punishment. George Orwell (fiction) 1984. Homage to Catalonia. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon.
There’s millions more!
Awsome! Thanks for sharing these 🙂
Sooo, what are you writing? Have you read any of these books? Some of the prisoners listed were political prisoners. Does that bring a different perspective to their writing? There’s got to be plenty of stories unique to you. Looking forward to reading some!
Hi. No, I haven’t read any of these books. I simply did a search online for a list of books within this prison genre.
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/19/books-written-in-prison
http://listverse.com/2012/06/10/top-10-works-written-in-prison/
Paul of Tarsus
Epistles to the Churches of Asia & Rome:
Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus.