Today Is...Day Of the Imprisoned Writer

If there is one good thing about being imprisoned, it certainly gives you time to pursue your hobbies whether that's tattooing yourself or bulking up in the Prison gym but some guys make a little better use of their time like writing some of the most influential works of literature ever.
Sir Thomas Malory was an MP who found a much more lucrative career was to rob and kidnap his political rivals but the long arm of whatever passed for the 15th Law caught him and he spent two years in prison writing Le Morte d’Arthur, one of the most famous medieval versions of the story of King Arthur Christopher Marlowe has long suspected to have had a hand in Shakespeare's plays and he was a famous writer when he wasn't getting drunk and brawling with anyone within punching distance which is how he ended up in prison and to pass the time wrote Doctor Faustus and may have written some more if he hadn't been killed in yet another drunken brawl days after his release from prison.
The author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, served time for 'seditious libel' and as the Marquis de Sade was in and out of prison all his life for things you wouldn't be able to mention in front of your grandmother, he had plenty of time to knock out his books which bought 'Sadism' into existence.
You couldn't swing a cat without hitting a literary genius in a 19th Century Russian Prison and Fyodor Dostoyevsky must have dodged lots of cats during his 8 year stint in a Siberian Prison Camp for revolutionary leanings but he did come out and write Crime and Punishment based on is experiences but staring at the inside of a prison cell worked for Oscar Wilde, when he was charged with two years for sodomy and gross indecency with men, he come out with The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Victor Hugo never went to prison as such but he did force himself into self imposed imprisonment, ordering his servants to lock him in a room each day until he had finished a certain amount of pages of Les Miserable's and The Hunchback of Notre Dame although as one was turned into a musical and the other an opera, i don't know what it is about his books which made people want to sing them.
Probably the most famous and far reaching book written in a jail cell was done in 1925 by a soldier who was committed to a German prison for attempting to overthrow the Government. Nine months into his five year sentence, Adolf Hitler walked out of the Landsberg Prison with Mein Kampf tucked under his arm and big, catastorohic plans to put his book into action.