Go Down Together

The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde

By Jeff Guinn
(Simon & Schuster, Paperback, 9781416557074, 480pp.)

Publication Date: March 9, 2010

Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover, Hardcover

Categories: Criminals & Outlaws, United States - General

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Jeff Guinn is the bestselling author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Last Gunfight and Go Down Together, which was a finalist for an Edgar Award in 2010. Formerly an award-winning investigative journalist and now a frequent guest on national radio and TV programs, he lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

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"Go Down Together casts a brilliant new light, not just on two hapless criminals but on the creation and then the devouring of the first American media darlings. Jeff Guinn is a great storyteller." -- Richard Ben Cramer, author of Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life

"Go Down Together is thorough, precise, beautifully written, and compulsively readable. It shines a brilliant lamp on two very unusual people, and, a bonus, it richly illuminates middle America between the wars. Completely fascinating." -- Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser novels

"This is the best Bonnie and Clyde book I've ever seen. Three-quarters of a century after their deaths, and following a multitude of contradictory accounts by surviving participants, Go Down Together still manages to lift the veil and uncover surprising new stories and details and fresh insights into both the famous outlaw lovers and the team of manhunters who brought them down. An eye-opener that will set historians and crime buffs alike talking for a long time to come." -- Rick Mattix, coauthor of The Complete Public Enemy Almanac

"Guinn cuts through the sex and gunsmoke surrounding the gangster love story of Bonnie and Clyde, and he reveals a couple of kids from the wrong side of the river who were anything but the sharpest gangsters to roam the countryside. His gritty chronicle is a welcome corrective to the affectionate portrait of the couple played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn's 1967 movie, Bonnie and Clyde, which told us much more about the rise of the Hollywood antihero than it did about the real-life criminals." -- J. Lynn Lunsford, The Wall Street Journal

"Go Down Together is a rollicking read, an astonishing story of perseverance in the face of hopelessness, and a perverse tale of two lovers whom only death could part.... Jeff Guinn strips away the glamour...to reveal the desperadoes as they really were.... His exhaustively researched chronicle of their misadventures seems definitive." -- Mark Dunkelman, The Providence Journal

"Go Down Together is a richly detailed dual biography.... Guinn, a Texas-based journalist, has researched their lives and times with the kind of thoroughness generally reserved for politicians and captains of industry." -- Allen Barra, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The true story of Bonnie and Clyde.... Intense but fascinating...rubs the gloss from the mythos and replaces it with a patina of true grit.... Guinn succeeds marvelously in re-creating the spirit of the times, the desperation of unemployment and financial ruin. It's a zeitgeist becoming chillingly familiar today, and that gives this book a wallop." -- Jackie Loohauis-Bennett, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Forget what you've heard or read (or seen in the laughable 1967 movie) about a glamorous young couple pulling off brilliant bank robberies, outsmarting and killing their pursuers.... Jeff Guinn relates Bonnie and Clyde's heyday of robbery and killing, their remarkable flight from justice and their grisly ending in such careful detail that you might wonder if he's making it up. He isn't. Go Down Together is the product of remarkable research through letters, diaries, memoirs, police and FBI reports, and interviews with family members. Much of the material has never been made public before." -- Bob Simmons, The Seattle Times

"An embracing biography of the Barrow Gang that draws us in like an old wanted poster.... Not only does Guinn maintain control of the mayhem.... the author manages to humanize the characters...while inserting them into the historical context of the times." -- Steve Bennett, San Antonio Express-News

"This intensely readable account de-romanticizes two of America's most notorious outlaws without undermining the mystique of the Depression-era gunslingers.... With the brisk pacing of a novel, Guinn's richly detailed history will leave readers breathless until the final hail of bullets." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)