Publisher's Synopsis
Before Caryl Chessman had been sentenced to die in the gas chamber of California's San Quentin Prison, his life was consecrated to crime, to violence against society. Yet, in Cell 2455, Death Row, a few yards from the squat ugly green room, he has written this book as an act of contrition as a benefit to society that shares responsibility for his warped soul. In addition, a major motion picture had been made about this case that came out in 1955 starring William Crawford.
Here is the alarming, disturbing story of how a creative genius became a destructive genius. Of how a man with an enormous capacity to love turned to and worshiped hate. Of how a well-meaning system can sometimes wreck such damage that it produces only a lust for revenge.
Read this brilliantly written record of an amazing life, and then challenge yourself to answer honestly whether you believe that capital punishment is necessary? That criminals are born, not made? That a "legal system" is infallible in rending justice? That crime can be prevented by force? That the craving to harm is anything but a disease?
No thinking, feeling person can read this book and feel the same thereafter. No squeamish person should even begin it. No one who takes refuge in self-satisfaction should proceed further on this point.
For once you have shared the bewilderment of the young chessman, ridden with him on his furious and daring escapes from the police, dodged the bullets of rival criminals, loved and wept and suffered - once you have lived with him in the shadow of the gas chamber and watched fifty unfortunates go past his cell to their deaths, you will understand how a thin line separates the life of a responsible member of society from that of those tortured, thwarted human beings.
This confession of a man fated to destroy himself is no craven plea for mercy. Here a commanding figure writes honestly and revealingly of one of the most wretched lives that ever lived. All this "child of the dark night" asks is that you see the hideous nature of Crime and learn to shun and to obliterate it.
Caryl Chessman, a direct descendant of John Greenleaf Whittier, has spent over one-third of his thirty-three years in confinement. For the last five years he had himself conducted from prison a brilliant legal attack on his conviction for a crime of which he claims he is innocent.
