You’ve heard the story of Jesse James, of how he lived and died; If you’re still in need of something to read, here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.”

The verse was penned in 1932 by notorious gun moll Bonnie Parker, shortly before she and partner-in-crime Clyde Barrow died in a Louisiana ambush. It sums up this engrossing new biography by Jeff Guinn, who traces the duo’s ardent affair, their love of fame and the two-year crime spree that spanned the American Dust Bowl during the Depression.

Thanks to the press, which linked them to countless crimes they did not commit, Bonnie and Clyde became the stuff of outlaw legend. But unlike other gangsters of the period—Ma Barker, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd—the Barrow Gang bumbled their way through a series of bank robberies, car thefts, shootouts and prison breaks that were almost comically inept, though they resulted in half a dozen senseless deaths.

Romanticized in the 1967 film with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, the real small-time crooks are far more compelling than their Hollywood alter egos. Mere kids when they launched their life of crime—they were in their early 20s when they died—the luckless lovers lived on the run, slept in roadside gullies and motor courts, suffered crippling injuries on the lam, taunted the “laws” with jeering letters and photos and relished their infamy, even as it inched them closer to the bloody shootout foretold by Bonnie, who wrote in her poem that they would “go down together.” They also became folk heroes to Depression-era Americans resentful of the rich and powerful.

Through exhaustive research and interviews with surviving members of the Barrow and Parker families, as well as the lawmakers who finally brought them down, Guinn presents Bonnie and Clyde as young rebels whose fatal flaws were a fierce defiance of authority and the refusal to accept the grinding poverty that was their lot. Go Down Together is a portrait not just of Bonnie and Clyde, but of America at its most down and out.

By Marjorie Preston

Marjorie is Managing Editor of Casino Connection Atlantic City.