ABSTRACT
In 1980 some of the biggest names in journalism gathered at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. As convicted murderers serving life sentences in Louisiana's State Penitentiary at Angola, the two were hardly permitted to travel to New York. In their stead the prison's warden and his associate accepted the prize. The Angolite's remarkable Odyssey took the formerly lackluster prison magazine to national fame. After the Civil War the eighteen-thousand acre plantation became the state's prison. "Traditionally an official in the prison hierarchy had always been moved up to assume such duties," noted the Angolite several years later. While C. Paul Phelps was granting the Angolite this unprecedented freedom, Wilbert Rideau, a black lifer, was again applying for a job on the magazine's staff. Where Billy Sinclair's style was lawyerly, with stories crafted as carefully as one would assemble a brief, Rideau had more of the flourish and assurance of a mature writer.
