The Complete Works of the Literate Dead

When San Francisco police forced their way into the barricaded apartment of a condemned building on Octavia Street the morning of June 21, 1973, they discovered the decaying bodies of four the first of what was to become an epidemic of group suicides. The Literate Dead, as this group came to be known by the press, would be better remembered today had the publication of their works not been indefinitely postponed in the wake of the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Ironically, it was another suicide, that of Mel Shadrack, that rescued The Complete Works from oblivion. The discovery of that manuscript among Shadrack’s papers is a significant contribution to our understanding of the curious decade of Richard Nixon, Jim Jones, and Dan White.