Author of the week: Conrad Black

last updated 8 January 2015

Conrad Black found his salvation in a novel, said Jonathan Kay in the Toronto National Post. In 2003, the Canadian-born media magnate was facing possible conviction for fraud and a lengthy U.S. prison sentence when he went to his library looking for a book that would help him cope with what he describes as “a sudden, overwhelming rout.” He pulled down Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, the story of a New York plutocrat who refuses to bow to his accusers despite a humiliating criminal trial. Black had found his inspiration. Sentenced to six-plus years in a federal correctional facility, he set to writing 3,000 words a day in his cell. His memoir, A Matter of Principle, is a defiant call for vindication and a riveting account of what he calls the “shocking education” of being incarcerated in the U.S.

Black is a changed man, said Bryan Burrough in Vanity Fair. “I’m not embarrassed in the least bit I was in prison,” he says. “You have to understand, I am an innocent man.” Having just been resentenced in a Chicago court to another 13 months on a final fraud count, he is, however, re-entering a period of forced rumination. “What I’ve been trying to do the last eight years is to deduce, what is the message of all this?” he says. “You have to believe, whether you are cleaning latrines or tutoring inmates, that it served some purpose.” Black says his goal in writing was to “expose the injustice of a system that is at the core of this great country. That is the takeaway, I think.”