Pathway of Mattie Howard (To and from Prison): True Story of An Ex-Convict and Gangster Woman 1937 SIGNED True Crime ~ Kansas City & Chicago

Title: Pathway of Mattie Howard (To and from Prison): True Story of the Regeneration of An Ex-Convict and Gangster Woman

Author: M. Harris [Mary Belle Harris] [Mattie Howard/Martha Alice Howard]

Description: Signed by Mattie Howard on front free endpaper. First edition. Boards in blue cloth with gilt lettering. Head of spine lightly pushed; minor scuffs to covers. 319, [1] pages. An attractive copy.

The story of Mattie Howard (1894-1984), a notable criminal and convicted murderer. Active in Kansas City, Missouri in the late-1910s, she ended up spending six-and-a-half years in the Missouri State Penitentiary, a time which is described here in some detail. Following her release, she returned to a life a crime, this time affiliating with some of the leading gangsters in Chicago, including Al Capone, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson. Following her disillusionment with crime, she moved to Denver, experienced a conversion to Christianity in 1932, and refashioned herself as an evangelist.

Although this widely presumed to be an autobiography told in the third person, it is ambiguously credited to a ''M. Harris'' (likely Mary Belle Harris, a leading prison reformer, who at the time was superintendent of the first national correctional institution for women, the Federal Industrial Institute for Women).

Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Near Fine
Jacket Condition: None

Publisher: [privately printed]
Place: [Denver, Colorado]
Year: 1937

Keywords: women, criminals, prison, criminology, crime, true crime, prisoners, Kansas City, Chicago, mobsters,