Ernest Granville Booth (1898-1959): The Double Life of a Convict Author

Plot 5, Grave 63, S 1/2

Ernest Granville Booth lived as if he were one of his own characters—half in shadow, half in print, always one bad decision away from the bars closing behind him again. Born in 1898, Booth became one of the strangest literary success stories of the Depression era: a man who robbed banks by day, broke bones trying to escape by night, and wrote with such clarity and bite that America briefly forgot he was doing it all from inside Folsom and San Quentin.

He entered prison young and stayed long. In 1924, the same day he married Valverda, a former San Francisco schoolteacher, Booth robbed an Oakland bank. The honeymoon never happened. Within hours he was arrested, sentenced to twenty-five years, and sent into California’s hardest institutions. What should have been the beginning of domestic life became instead a long correspondence conducted through bars, censors, and parole boards. Thirteen years later, when he finally walked free, newspapers called it a “belated honeymoon,” as if time itself had merely been paused rather than destroyed.

Butte County arrest notice

Prison broke Booth physically before it refined him intellectually. In 1928, attempting to escape over the wall at San Quentin, he shattered both legs and lay immobilized in casts. It was there, staring at a ceiling and his own limits, that Booth decided he was finished going nowhere fast. He began to write seriously—short stories, essays, and prison sketches hammered out after quarry work and by dim lights at night. What he produced was unsparing and exact: prison not as melodrama, but as bureaucracy, boredom, cruelty, and absurdity.

Editors noticed. Most notably, Henry L. Mencken took Booth seriously enough to publish him in The American Mercury, a stamp of legitimacy few inmates ever received. Mencken admired Booth’s prose for its lack of sentimentality and its refusal to moralize. Booth wrote as a man who knew exactly how easy it was to fall, and how hard it was to stand back up when the system preferred you prone.

Booth's book "Stealing Through Life"

Booth’s major works followed a consistent theme: crime stripped of romance and prison stripped of illusion. His best-known works included We Rob a Bank and Ladies of the Mob, both published in The American Mercury, and the books Stealing Through Life and With Sirens Screaming. These were not confessions so much as anatomies—cool dissections of criminal logic, prison routine, and the thin line between competence and catastrophe. Ladies of the Mob attracted Hollywood attention and was adapted into a motion picture starring Clara Bow, turning Booth, briefly, into a profitable commodity rather than a state expense.

Booth's book With Sirens Screaming

That success helped him win parole in 1937. He walked out of Folsom a famous man, greeted by Valverda, who had waited since 1924 and served as his typist, editor, and anchor. The terms of his release were cruelly ironic: Booth was forbidden for two and a half years from writing about prisons, prison officials, or parole boards—the very subjects that had made his name. Still, he complied, settled in California’s mountain country to recover from tuberculosis, and tried to live like someone who would never hear a cell door close again.

It did not last. Booth’s life followed a pattern familiar to parole officers and noir novelists alike: reform, recognition, relapse. In the 1940s he drifted back into crime, serving both state and federal sentences for theft and bank robbery. By 1947 he was again in San Quentin, and later at Terminal Island Hospital, his lungs failing where his resolve already had. Newspapers that once celebrated his freedom now ran headlines about “new trouble,” as if trouble had ever truly left him.

Even in decline, Booth retained his acid clarity. In 1957, long after parole boards and publishers alike had tired of him, he made a small splash by complaining—almost cheerfully—about Los Angeles smog. He admitted he had once pleaded guilty to a federal charge because he preferred prison air to the brown haze hanging over the city. Later, he changed his mind. The smog, he said, was “not so bad” after all. It was a line that could have come straight from one of his books: dry, resigned, amused by the absurdity of choosing between poisons.

Article on prison authors including Booth

Booth died in 1959, worn down by illness, confinement, and the long erosion of second chances. His career places him among a small, unsettling fraternity: criminals whose intelligence and talent flourished in mainstream culture even as their lives collapsed outside it. Like the forger and memoirist Edward Bunker, or the brilliant con man Charles Ponzi, Booth proved that genius does not redeem character, and talent does not guarantee escape. Skill can sharpen the fall as easily as prevent it.

What remains is the work—lean, unsentimental, and steeped in the moral fog of its time. Booth wrote crime the way film noir would soon film it: with sympathy but no illusions, style without forgiveness. He understood prisons because he lived them, understood criminals because he was one, and understood freedom only as something briefly tasted, then lost. In the end, Ernest Granville Booth did what few men behind bars ever manage. He made himself heard. He just never learned how to stop listening to the voice that kept calling him back inside.

Sources: contemporary newspaper coverage (Associated Press, United Press, INS, Oakland Tribune, Long Beach Independent, Ogden Standard-Examiner, South Haven Daily Tribune, Corona Daily Independent, Star-News, 1917–1957); Wikipedia entry on Ernest Granville Booth; Mountain View Cemetery (Oakland) burial and interment records; California Department of Corrections historical files (Folsom Prison and San Quentin); American Mercury magazine archives; Alfred A. Knopf publication records; contemporary film and literary trade reporting.