This isn't a book about being in jail. Instead, it is a book about continuing to fight. Inside prison, Cannon and the others educated themselves about Marxism, discussed plans to explain the workers movement when they got out of prison, surveyed the changes in the world that World War II brought, and fought the pessimism that the war, Stalinism, and imprisonment had brought to some of them. Cannon, as always, is humorous, insightful, and just plain wise

In 1944-45 James P. Cannon and 17 other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minnesota truck drivers union were imprisoned for opposing Washington's imperialist aims in World War II, convicted under the thought-control Smith Act. In his prison journal, Cannon addresses key questions of building, organizing, and educating a communist party capable of preparing for the explosive working-class battles that would follow the war. A traveling organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World before and during World War I, James P. Cannon was a leader of the Communist Party in the United States following the Russian revolution of October 1917. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 for supporting Leon Trotsky's fight to continue V.I. Lenin's revolutionary course. A founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party, Cannon served as its national secretary and then national chairman until his death in 1974. From the introduction by Jack Barnes: "Growing numbers of young people have begun to reject the evils of capitalist America - war, racism, poverty, its sick culture. They want to replace capitalism with a better system. But how is this to be done? What kind of organization must be built to lead this struggle? What kind of men and women will the job require? These are the very questions discussed in Letters from Prison." (from the back cover)