Jose Leon: From Inmate to Writer, an Unusual Case

BT63 Trincheras José León Sánchez escritor writer novela la isla de los hombres solos preso inmate virgen angeles

Accused and condemned for the theft of the Virgin of the Angels in 1950, José León Sánchez, whom La Nación would call the  monster of the Basilica, regained his freedom on June 8, 1970. After a  ew years of “disoriented adolescence,” stuck in the world of juvenile misdeeds and condemned to more than thirty years for a crime he never committed, in jail -in the prison of San Lucas- he began rectification and study, learning to read and write first, in the Reformatory San Dimas. He dreamed of stealing a million dollars, as he himself tells it, traveling through Central America, Guatemala and Honduras to Mexico, only 15 years old. The writer’s virus - as he called it- came to him in the mud of the prison. In Saint Luke and at the Penitentiary he had to live the “time of cruelty in prisons as I have not seen anything alike.” That is the testimony of the “Island of Lonely Men” in 1963, a creepy story about the cruel reality  prisoners like himself and his companions lived. Other successful works followed, “Tenochtitlan.” “The Last Battle of the Aztecs”, “Bells to Call to the Wind”, “The Moon of the Red Grass”, and his memorable stories, “To the Left of the Sun”, and his personal and literary chronicles “Of what Color is the World.”

Trincheras novela la isla de los hombres solos preso inmate virgen angeles

“The Island of the Lonely Men”, translated into several languages, was taken to the cinema with great success. When the publication of this novel in the United States was announced, the Papillion publishing company accused him of plagiarism, because in his novel there was a chapter identical to that of the French writer. He was able to prove that his work was from 1963, before Henri Charrier’s.
He was finally released after he had served 29 years of imprisonment. Today at almost 90 years of age he is the most renowned living writer in Costa Rica; and why not say it and dream it, a credible candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.


By Prof. Fernando Herrera

CONTACT: Prof. Fernando Herrera - Trincheras en Pérez Zeledón – 8651 1057

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