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 Berkley chorus girl, Bunker was-at seventeen-the youngest inmate ever in St. 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 killer, from Hollywood's seamy underside 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 led.