He went to Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love and copped lines from all of the most successful street gurus. He studied Scientology, not to possibly join that faith but to see how it used persuasive ideas to recruit members. … He cribbed material straight from Dale Carnegie classes he took in prison. You’ve got to remember this goes all the way back to him being dragged to Sunday School … and memorizing pretty much all of the Book of Revelations. He took every potentially positive influence in culture, in his personal life, and twisted it. He is also a product of the ’50s and the ’40s and the ’30s. “Manson is a product of the ’60s and the counterculture (movement). And all I could have done was maybe describe the way he looks now.” On Manson’s place in history Because if he had agreed to see me, I would have gotten the Crazy Charlie act for 20 minutes. I don’t have many regrets that Manson wouldn’t talk to me. and it ended cryptically: “They don’t let me interview as I want.” I’ve been writing him ever since and never heard another thing. Finally I got a letter from him, it was pretty abusive about me. “Every day for months and months I sent him a letter asking him to talk to me, telling him I would come at any time. View Gallery: Charles Manson through the years On failing to interview Manson And sooner or later, they’d suggest people I should talk to, and finally we found his sister and his cousin who had never been interviewed before.” And I just knocked on doors and talked to people. I went back to the places where he lived as a child. “All that was ever known about Manson’s background is what he chose to tell. I wanted to know if he is a monster, how did we grow him.” On Manson’s background The rest of the books almost universally present him as sort of a full-blown monster suddenly showing up in LA. There were hundreds of Manson books but not the one I wanted to write. “I wanted to write a book that captured the craziness and confusion of the 1960s. Corral - and How It Changed the American West.” He recently spoke about writing and researching Manson. Guinn has written more than a dozen books, including “The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. This is a crime story the way David Halberstam would have told it.

He uses Manson to tell a stark history of America from the Kentucky backwoods prior to the Great Depression to Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s and the dark decline of the counterculture movement. Guinn’s book relies on exclusive interviews with Manson’s sister and cousin, childhood friends, cellmates and some of his most ardent former followers to provide a complete picture of a troubled boy who grew into one of history’s most iconic criminals.īut Guinn has done more than write a true-crime sensation.

Manson by Jeff Guinn