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impulse which moved us to write this book was primarily indignation—indignation at facts. At facts learned slowly and gradually by one of us through years of patient investigation, and then told, all in one mass, to the other, who thus came to them with an abruptness giving intense vision. A work written in the fervor of indignation is apt to be violent, unbalanced, and unjust. We were alive to this danger; after some thought, we saw how we could best avoid it. It was by using in the story facts only. 9009 is a story made of facts—a Fact-Story.

By this we do not mean that 9009 is a biography. Convict 9009—John Collins—exists only in our imagination. But everything that happens to 9009 within the prison is something which has happened to some convict in some Rh