Essay On Charles Manson

Words: 486
Pages: 2

Manson by Jeff Guinn depicts the life and events in history surrounding the infamous cultist, Charles Manson. Charles Manson was a troubled child who greatly lacked a home environment. His childhood was spent mostly in rough boys homes, and then in prison in early adulthood. However, when he got out of prison after a ten year term, he seemed to have turned his life around. He moved to California and became a guru, a spiritual teacher, during the summer of love. The problem was, this facade wouldn't last forever, and soon began to crumble.

As a child, Manson was a genius of crime, either running from trouble or perplexing his accusers with a saintly smile. As he grew older, he stopped getting into trouble as often. Manson left prison in the summer of 1967, torn between becoming a celebrity pop star and becoming a pimp. On the streets of Haight-Ashbury, a town in California, he was able to make both dreams come true, playing his guitar as a park preacher, or guru, in order to amass a group of young women and teenage runaways. Manson instructed his followers to “shed their inhibitions and abandon their possessions”. But all the while he was collecting their earnings and employing the girls as sexual bargaining chips to gain advantages for
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By 1969, his hopes of legitimacy were down the gutter. He and the "family,” the group of followers he had amassed, had settled near the run down Spahn Movie Ranch. There, behind the faded storefronts that once played host to the cast members of Zorro and Bonanza, Manson hosted LSD-fuelled orgies, and read aloud from the Book of Revelation. He also played the song “Helter Skelter,” which as he explained, prophesied an apocalyptic race war in which black America would rise up to destroy the white ruling class. Then, after an unspecified period, his "family" would emerge from the rubble and take over the