as a teen, author Donn Pearce ran away and joined the Army. He worked in the French black market, which landed him in a Marseille prison from which he promptly escaped. He biked back to the coast and hitchhiked back to the U.S. as a merchant marine.

Upon his return stateside, he went into a brief life of crime that included safecracking.
All of this before he turned 20.

Pearce is blunt. “Yeah, I did all that. And I popped my cherry over there, too! There was a lot of talk about whether or not I should tell people I was an ex-con when the book first came out.”

He wrote the novel “Cool Hand Luke,” which became the multi-Academy-Award-winning film starring Paul Newman in 1967.

That is why I was in Florida. Pearce is to be included in the special-edition DVD release of “Cool Hand Luke.” I moonlight as a featurette segment producer.

Clinically manic, his stories weave in and out like a verbal tarantella of silken sentences. And a smile of delight crosses his face each time I recognize one of his name-droppings of fairly popular pensmiths he’s worked into a meandering tale.

“I was in prison in Northern Florida. I went there over about $168 worth of tools!” Appearing embarrassed he added, “I switched sides for my wife almost 35 years ago and helped put away about 210 criminals since.”

Pearce looks like a kindly older guy who’s seen better days. His walk is pained and slow and his back bent. But his eyes are illuminated with a twinkle so intense it’s as if his soul is trying to escape its elder cask.

Pearce said he only went into crime after “having a brief factory job with a great pension plan that bored me dumb.” He has a recorded IQ of 142.

His modest Florida home looks like a 1970s time capsule, complete with orange shag and funky wood paneling. His angry- but-beautiful abstractly whimsical paintings hang in every corner.

Pearce takes out a box that holds two sets of identical chain-gang shackles. “The real set weigh three pounds and are practically impenetrable.”

The set he clipped from the movie set are nine ounces. “You could fling them with a pinkie finger.” Pearce plays with them, “There are always 13 links on these f***ers. You think that was someone’s sick joke?”

He is referring to the many associations to the Bible people insist run through “Cool Hand Luke.”

“I didn’t plan any of that stuff. But everyone keeps telling me Luke is like Jesus. In the film it was heavy. That a**hole director [Stuart] Rosenberg actually posed [Paul] Newman out like Jesus on the crucifix after the famous egg eating contest. Subtle.”

Then he explains, “The book is two-thirds fiction and one-third autobiographical. I took real stories and joined them with bullshit. Luke was some guy in my prison before my time. I’d hear all these inflated tales about him. I forget his real name now.”

He talks candidly about his book-to-film experience. “You always hear about these authors selling the books, and when the film comes out they boo-hoo from their apartment in New York about how off it was. I insisted I be included.”

Pearce was sent to California. But the studio usurped his first draft and called in Frank Pierson for rewrites and polishing.

Director Stuart Rosenberg discovered and championed the little book, but became a nemesis. The one scene Pearce feels “got it right” was of the chain gang tarring a road.

“Rosenberg, who had me as a technical advisor and ignored everything I told him, calls me in. ‘How tall were the sand piles? How do they shovel?’ Now they had me on a studio lot somewhere teaching these wimpy actors how to shovel for chrissakes! They were holding the shovels like they were dainty toothpicks.”

On set Pearce said Newman acted like a big star. “Back in Los Angeles, he asked me to dinner. Then, showing how bad an actor he truly is, he says to me, ‘Err, um I forgot I have something that, ah, came up. I have to cancel.’”

Angry like it happened yesterday, Pearce explained, “The truth is he didn’t want to drive down Rodeo Drive and be seen with an ex-con.”

Clearly Pearce has “no failure to communicate” his distaste for the whole experience. And the infamous catch-phrase referenced above makes Pearce actually wince.

“Pierson, the other screenwriter, is to blame for that stupid line. No Southern chain gang boss would ever say something like that. But that’s just one of a million liberties they took when the book became a film.”

That particular liberty is number eight on the American Film Institute’s Top 101 Film Quotes of all Time list.

Pearce has written several other novels in the decades after his post-“Luke” fame, including “Nobody Comes Back,” “Dying in the Sun” and Pier Head Jump.” Sadly, each has barely paid the publishers his advances. But the forgotten author is still a master storyteller who whips phonetic language beside proper literary structures.