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Cool Hand Luke (novel)
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Cool Hand Luke (novel)
Cool Hand Luke is a novel by Donn Pearce published in 1965. It was adapted into the 1967 Oscar-winning film Cool Hand Luke.
The story is told in a first-person narrative from the perspective of a convict in a central Florida prison. He works on a chain gang maintaining the berms of highways. He recounts the story of a "legendary" fellow inmate whose nickname is Cool Hand Luke.
The novel is based on Pearce's personal experiences while incarcerated with a Florida prison road gang.
Donn Pearce was arrested for burglary and served two years at Raiford State Prison in central Florida, from 1949 to 1951, working hard labor on a road gang. At night, he began writing about the incidents he witnessed or heard. He also began reading such books as Faulkner's Sanctuary. According to Pearce, about a third of Cool Hand Luke is his own story, a third is based on the stories he heard while doing time at Raiford, and another third is pure fiction. In 1959, after gaining freedom, Pearce broke a leg in a motorcycle crash and, with free time available, began writing the novel, based on his prison notes and memories. After writing the first draft, he re-wrote it five times over a six-year period. He had trouble finding a publisher, until Fawcett Books finally agreed to publish the novel as a 'paperback original', paying Pearce $2,500. Scribners then published it as a hardback.
The prose style is unusual in that although there is dialogue, and all quotes are indented paragraphs, they are not encased in quotation marks.
The most oft-repeated quote from the film, "What we've got here is failure to communicate", never appeared in the novel. Pearce said the guards were "100% redneck", without multi-syllable vocabularies, who would never have said such an intellectually astute phrase."
A contemporary review in Kirkus Reviews called it "a kind of classic small tall story (in latrine language)".
The novel was adapted to film in 1967, based on a screenplay by Pearce. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
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Cool Hand Luke (novel)
Cool Hand Luke is a novel by Donn Pearce published in 1965. It was adapted into the 1967 Oscar-winning film Cool Hand Luke.
The story is told in a first-person narrative from the perspective of a convict in a central Florida prison. He works on a chain gang maintaining the berms of highways. He recounts the story of a "legendary" fellow inmate whose nickname is Cool Hand Luke.
The novel is based on Pearce's personal experiences while incarcerated with a Florida prison road gang.
Donn Pearce was arrested for burglary and served two years at Raiford State Prison in central Florida, from 1949 to 1951, working hard labor on a road gang. At night, he began writing about the incidents he witnessed or heard. He also began reading such books as Faulkner's Sanctuary. According to Pearce, about a third of Cool Hand Luke is his own story, a third is based on the stories he heard while doing time at Raiford, and another third is pure fiction. In 1959, after gaining freedom, Pearce broke a leg in a motorcycle crash and, with free time available, began writing the novel, based on his prison notes and memories. After writing the first draft, he re-wrote it five times over a six-year period. He had trouble finding a publisher, until Fawcett Books finally agreed to publish the novel as a 'paperback original', paying Pearce $2,500. Scribners then published it as a hardback.
The prose style is unusual in that although there is dialogue, and all quotes are indented paragraphs, they are not encased in quotation marks.
The most oft-repeated quote from the film, "What we've got here is failure to communicate", never appeared in the novel. Pearce said the guards were "100% redneck", without multi-syllable vocabularies, who would never have said such an intellectually astute phrase."
A contemporary review in Kirkus Reviews called it "a kind of classic small tall story (in latrine language)".
The novel was adapted to film in 1967, based on a screenplay by Pearce. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.