A Bad Man can be located within a long and distinguished tradition of prison literature. Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment (1866) and Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) studied the effects of incarceration on a criminal, and in each the process of suffering has been a movement toward self-discovery. More directly, A Bad Man can be situated in the recent tradition of existentialist prison literature, especially Franz Kafka's The Trial (1925) and Albert Camus's The Stranger (1942), books in which the hero is imprisoned for something he does not regard as a crime, but society does, and novels in which the hero's defiance of authority is a defining and admirable gesture.

Two novels of the decade also share concerns and techniques with this novel. Bernard Malamud's The Fixer (1966), which Elkin reviewed unenthusiastically, studies the effects of political imprisonment on a Russian Jew, and the eerie atmosphere of the prison and the sadistic...