Inmates favored Flannery O'Connor because her cover photo made her look "kind of busted up."

Avi Steinberg, a Harvard graduate with no direction in life, answered a Craigslist ad and became a librarian to male and female prison inmates in Boston. He learned what writers prisoners most like–Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, Martina Cole–but also that maybe literacy can’t heal all deep-seated problems. He’s written about his experience in Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian. (Thanks to Marginal Revolution.) An excerpt from a Guardian article about the book:

“Steinberg’s experiences seem to have made him somewhat wary of the notion that books have the power to transform – not least after the occasion when he was mugged in a park by an ex-con who boasted that he’d still got two overdue titles that Steinberg had issued to him. ‘Transformation was not necessarily the main story,’ he reflects. ‘It happened in some instances but they were notable exceptions. Prisoners weren’t there to transform themselves, or be transformed – but they would still come to the library.'”