While imprisoned, one would usually feel less free. But, the exact opposite happened to Malcolm X who felt even more free, as he states, “In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life”, while he was in Charlestown Prison. There he would learn how to write by looking through the dictionary and read until the morning, getting three to four hours of sleep. Now, the question is why does he feel like he had more freedom in jail than in his actual life? Well the reasoning behind it is because in jail, he had no worries, other than the guards who would walk by his cell. He didn’t have to worry about a pet dog to feed, a job that has deadlines, or any bills that needed to be paid for. With this, he had all the free time to go through the dictionary and to read books until late at night. One thing that really stuck out was when he says, “No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me, of being able to read and understand“. In this, he emphasizes the word “understand”. What’s important about this is the fact that he is able to understand due to the amount of time and the freedom that he has that allows him to fully take in what he is reading with efficiency. He become well learned in vocabulary and writing as well from this freedom that he has, showing this correlation between freedom and literature. It is something that is rarely done in today’s society, depending on who the person may be.

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