Authorities remove Caryl Chessman's handcuffs at a post-conviction court hearing. He became a media star during his long battle to save himself from "that ugly green room" — San Quentin's gas chamber.

When convict Caryl Chessman went to his death in California’s gas chamber last Monday, he did so against the strenuous protests of hundreds of New Yorkers who met in Greenwich Village two days earlier ...

Toward midnight the lights still burned in California’s state capitol in Sacramento. Cecil Poole, clemency secretary to Governor Edmund Brown, rummaged through the bales of telegrams that flooded the ...

On this day, May 2, in 1960, Caryl Whittier Chessman went to the gas chamber in California’s San Quentin Prison. Chessman — also known as the “Red Light Bandit” — was once a cause celebre for the ...

The inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, this debut collection from Gleason contains enlightening and beautifully written essays on illness and medicine. The Continue reading » Letters ...

He was mid-century America’s foremost tough-hooligan intellectual, a high school dropout and autodidact who wrote and published four books while waiting to die. He bragged colorfully about his ...