John Cleland wrote his (very) erotic novel, Fanny Hill, in prison. What did he mean by it?

The “unlove and unfreedom” in Johnnie B. Smith’s work songs.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature.During the thirteen years he spent jailed for murder on a Texas prison farm, Johnnie B. Smith sang work songs. In 1964, the ethnomusicolog…

On September 14, 1838, the precociously gifted twenty-three-year-old poet Jones Very was removed under mysterious circumstances from his post as a Greek tutor at Harvard. The previous day, he had visited the Unitarian minister Henry Ware Jr., a promi…

The memoirs of an imprisoned suffragette. Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on John Cleland’s very erotic prison novel, here.In 1908, when she was thirty-seven, Lady Constance Lytton took a vacation by the …

John Cleland wrote his (very) erotic novel, Fanny Hill, in prison. What did he mean by it?Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Merle Haggard and the long tradition of the outlaw poet, here.John Cleland’s …

The long tradition of outlaw poets.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Austin Reed’s The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, here.Early in the first volume of Panegyric—the bad-tempered, ironic…

The rediscovered prison memoir of a nineteenth-century black man.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, here.On the back cover of the manuscript of his prison memoir, whi…

On the dark erotics of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers.On September 11, 1895, the deputy chaplain of Wandsworth prison wrote a worried report about one of his new charges, Oscar Wilde, who had been transferred from Pentonville two months before.…

John Clare, Christopher Smart, and the poetry of the asylum.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, here.In an agrarian or preindustrial Britain, a brilliant young man bristle…

We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!How Oscar Wilde’s prison sentence changed him.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry…

George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, forty years later.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on the French revolutionary Madame Roland, here.On August 21, 1971, George Jackson pulled a pistol on his wardens at San…

Before she was guillotined, the inscrutable Madame Roland wrote a remarkable memoir.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Abdellatif Laâbi’s poems, here.It could be said that the men with the greatest influe…

Abdellatif Laâbi’s poems are at war with barbarism.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, here.In Le livre imprévu, his 2010 collection of autobiographical essays, the Moroccan poe…

How Oscar Wilde’s prison sentence changed him.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on writers who found God from behind bars, here.The first time Oscar Wilde saw the inside of a prison, it was 1882—thirteen …

On the long line of conversion literature from imprisoned writers.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the first entry, on Dostoyevsky’s Notes from a Dead House, here. In one of his later theological tracts, the sixteenth-centur…

This is the first in a series by Max Nelson on prison literature.No writer intends to produce prison literature. Just as incarceration involves its own awful set of debasements, drudgeries, and abuses, so it marks any writing done under its restricti…

Poe’s vision of the cosmos and the art it inspired.Since adolescence, Edgar Allan Poe had been picking fights with science. His second collection of poetry, published when he was all of twenty, opened with a mischievous sonnet needling what he called…