During the Jim Crow era, jails were an essential tool for the enforcement of white supremacy. For Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the long-term goal of the civil rights movement was to destroy the Jim Crow system through a vigilant strategy of nonviolent protest that would fill the jails and shine a light on injustice. King elevated this strategy through his own arrest, incarceration, and subsequent Letter from Birmingham Jail. King’s letter offered a scathing indictment of the gradualist strategy for achieving racial justice in Alabama that had led to unsolved bombings of Black institutions, unfair treatment in the legal system, and police brutality. In response to those who criticized his presence in Birmingham for the march, he wrote that he could not “sit idly by” in Atlanta and continue to be indifferent. “Injustice anywhere was a threat to justice everywhere.”

Hemingway was drawn to the conflict between individual and nature, whether that conflict took the form of hunting or fishing or the ritualized and scripted form of the bullfight. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hemingway developed these themes not only in the stories and novels but also in the nonfiction works that contributed to his celebrity. This chapter explores Hemingway’s elaboration of the face-off with death first in the two substantial nonfiction works that dominate his work of the 1930s: Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa. Death in the Afternoon purports to be a general reader’s introduction to the exotic sport/ritual sacrifice/art form of the Spanish bullfight. Green Hills of Africa recounts and interprets the big-game hunting that Hemingway undertook on safari in Africa. The text invites (or requires) an engagement with colonialism and Hemingway’s inescapable implication in a colonizing view of the relationship of the Euro-American hunter to the landscape, animals, and people of Africa. In his fiction of this period, Hemingway also sets the individual’s doomed search for meaning in the contexts of crime, especially in the story collection Winner Take Nothing and in his novel To Have and Have Not.

This introduction sets out a few overarching themes: Hemingway as a restlessly experimental writer, one driven to represent an ever-greater range of human experience and expression. Hemingway’s pressing against the boundaries of readers’ taste and tolerance is introduced, as is his identity as a person who lived with both visible and invisible disabilities and treated the ways of being in the world specifically available to the disabled.

The last decade of Hemingway’s life is characterized by the culmination of his recognition as a great writer and, at the same time, by a diminution of his writerly power. During that decade, Hemingway continued to write prolifically and to be recognized for his literary achievements. His thematic preoccupations remained consistent; he continued to write on bullfighting (a substantial article for Life magazine) and on big-game hunting and sport fishing (including The Old Man and the Sea, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novella). The chapter also assesses the novels and nonfiction books published after Hemingway’s death in 1961: A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, and Garden of Eden. With the possible exception of A Moveable Feast, the extent to which these books should be read as “books by Ernest Hemingway” is debatable. The author was famous for the work of condensation and cutting that characterized his revision process absent from the final preparation of their manuscripts. In the strongest passages of all of this work, Hemingway is able to thematize the exhaustion and belatedness that he seems to have been struggling against, so that even the failed work offers rewards to the careful reader.

Leonard Peltier was convicted in 1977 for the killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Despite allegations of governmental misconduct and questionable legal rulings, the conviction was affirmed on appeal by several federal courts. After nearly fifty years in prison, Peltier was granted clemency by President Biden in 2025 and allowed to finish his sentence under home confinement. This chapter recounts Peltier’s background, his involvement with the American Indian Movement, and the events surrounding the incident at Pine Ridge. His memoir, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, was published in 1999. The chapter examines the book’s experimental, transgressive form and its subversion of standard memoir style and structure. Prison Writings utilizes a nonlinear structure, multiple voices, surreal elements, and political and legal analyses, as well as the inclusion of poetry and photographs. Peltier also incorporates Native history and social issues as well as a critique of carceral standards in the federal prison system.

In this chapter three prison memoirs are recalled, detailing the stories of three men that significantly shaped the civil rights revolution during the 1960s. Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver wrote about their lives before prison, during the struggle, in prison, and after prison. They tell the story of the Black Panther Party and introduce the readers to their deepest feelings about life in America as oppressed Black men fighting for liberation. Nonetheless, their history stands apart

from other people who have written about this period simply because their personal journeys led them to prison and jail where these narratives were organized, outlined, and composed

as prison memoirs.

The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

This chapter sketches the contexts, both broadly historical and more narrowly cultural, for Hemingway’s life and work from the 1910s through the 1950s, including the wars he experienced and the literary scenes that his work both shaped and was shaped by.

From his 1982 conviction for killing a police officer and death sentence to the 2010 commutation of that sentence to life-in-prison-without-parole, Mumia Abu-Jamal has experienced and studied mass incarceration intimately as a political prisoner. At the local level, Mumia’s case is a microcosm of the period of the 1970s and 1980s in Philadelphia – the highpoint of rogue white supremacy within the city’s police department and the District Attorney’s office. At the macro level, the period of his incarceration spans the decades of exponential carceral expansion in the US that began in the 1980s. In the more than four decades since his 1982 conviction, the Abu-Jamal has penned thirteen books and thousands of short radio commentaries from prison, most notably Live from Death Row, which features harrowing, first-hand accounts of aging men and their struggles for medical care in the face of physical illness, younger men who are psychically and spiritually pulverized by guard brutality, barbarous conditions, humiliating body cavity strip searches, and the unnatural social isolation of death row imprisonment.

The civil war in Spain provoked deeper political thinking and involvement for Hemingway, and his political engagement shaped his writing about that war. Hemingway returned to his journalistic roots in the war reportage he wrote on the conflict, and experimented with dramatic form in his only play, The Fifth Column. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he absorbs, adapts, and rejects a romanticized view of the Spanish Civil War that had been developed and promulgated by European and American writers sympathetic (as Hemingway was) to the Spanish Republican cause, stripping from the realities of internecine conflict any potentially consoling significance of political commitment. The Second World War also drew Hemingway as a war correspondent (initially reluctant, he became an enthusiastic witness to, and even participant in, combat in France and Germany). On the basis of his wartime experience, he explored themes of forgiveness and grace in Across the River and into the Trees, a flawed novel whose purgatorial narrative is nevertheless an interesting experiment in fictional form.

The internationally acclaimed Apache-Chicano writer Jimmy Santiago Baca was born into generational poverty in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1952. Both of his parents abandoned him by his seventh birthday, and by age eleven he was living on the streets and enduring stints in juvenile detention. By nineteen he found himself in an isolation cell in the maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado. Therein, he taught himself to read and write, initiating the meteoric literary career of one of the most influential voices in Chicano letters and in prison studies. Baca’s oeuvre currently includes thirty-four books of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoir, as well as the script for the film Bound by Honor (1993). Regardless of genre, Baca writes about traumatic loss and pain, including his remarkable capacity for enduring it. His predominant theme is carcerality, which he ardently critiques from within. His poetry is especially powerful in this vein, consistently exploring incarceration as nothing less than the intentional destruction of human life. Additionally, Baca’s poetry has always shared a vision of the literary arts as a means to bear witness to such cruel violence and to work compassionately toward social justice for all people.

This chapter follows Hemingway from his journalistic work in the early 1920s through the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926. Ambitious to write fiction that would be innovative and popular, Hemingway absorbed the influences of Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others as he adapted news stories into sketches and wrote short stories based on combat experience and on his youth. Hemingway’s early style grew in the rich soil of literary experimentation in Paris in the 1920s, where he encountered an international literary and artistic avant-garde. This earliest work exemplifies Hemingway’s experimentation and its relationship to his deep need to express the apparently inexpressible contents of his psyche and experience. The reception of his 1925 story collection In Our Time established his early reputation. This chapter’s reading of The Sun Also Rises emphasizes Hemingway’s ironic deployment of both received narrative conventions and religiously significant pilgrimage and ritual themes, which locates Hemingway in a crucial vein of literary modernism exemplified by Eliot’s The Waste Land. Like these other modernist works, Hemingway’s novel is immured in the social attitudes within which he worked; anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia tangle the novel’s surface texture but also shape its narrative structures.