Helen Prejean inmates on Death Row and witnessed several more executions. She served as National Chairperson of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty from 1993 to 1995. She published "Dead Man Walking" (1993), an account of her relationship with Sonnier and other inmates on death row, and the factors related to her growing opposition to the death penalty. The book was adapted for a 1995 feature film of the same name; she was portrayed by Susan Sarandon. Her book was also adapted as an opera, first produced in 2000; and as a play. For her book, she drew from her
Helen (play) root of all evil. About thirty years before this play, Herodotus argued in his "Histories" that Helen had never in fact arrived at Troy, but was in Egypt during the entire Trojan War. The Archaic lyric poet Stesichorus had made the same assertion in his "Palinode" (itself a correction to an earlier poem corroborating the traditional characterization that made Helen out to be a woman of ill repute). The play "Helen" tells a variant of this story, beginning under the premise that rather than running off to Troy with Paris, Helen was actually whisked away to Egypt by the gods.