Autobiography of a Thief

This is the raw, unapologetic memoir of a man who spent his life stealing, and three terms in prison paying for it. Written in collaboration with journalist Hutchins Hapgood, it offers something rare for its era: a criminal's-eye view of American life, from the desperation of the streets to the brutality of the institutions meant to punish him. The thief here is no romantic outlaw. He's shrewd, articulate, and angry. He wants revenge against the state institutions that dehumanized him, but he also possesses a strange integrity, his code, however flawed, is at least honest. The book pulses with early 20th-century New York's underworld: pickpocketing techniques, prison conditions, the rot inside public institutions. What makes it endure is its central tension: a man who broke society's laws, yet exposes how society broke itself in return. One of the first autobiographies to give the American underworld a genuine voice.