Drawing on untapped archives and full of fresh revelations, here is the definitive biography of America's legendary defense attorney and progressive hero.
Clarence Darrow is the lawyer every law school student dreams of being: on the side of right, loved by many women, played by Spencer Tracy in "Inherit the Wind." His days-long closing arguments delivered without notes won miraculous reprieves for men doomed to hang.
Darrow left a promising career as a railroad lawyer during the tumultuous Gilded Age in order to champion poor workers, blacks, and social and political outcasts against big business, Jim Crow, and corrupt officials. He became famous defending union leader Eugene Debs in the land-mark Pullman Strike case and went from one headline case to the next--until he was nearly crushed by an indictment for bribing a jury. He redeemed himself in Dayton, Tennessee, defending schoolteacher John Scopes in the "Monkey Trial," cementing his place in history.
Now, John A. Farrell draws on previously unpublished correspondence and memoirs to offer a candid account of Darrow's divorce, affairs, and disastrous finances; new details of his feud with his law partner, the famous poet Edgar Lee Masters; a shocking disclosure about one of his most controversial cases; and explosive revelations of shady tactics he used in his own trial for bribery.
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"Clarence Darrow" is a sweeping, surprising portrait of a leg-endary legal mind.

Reviews

Praise for "Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned
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"[This is] vintage Darrow, inspiring, enraging, and, in Farrell's engrossing biography, marvelously alive."
--"The New York Times"
"John A. Farrell, with access to previously unavailable materials, brings the 'grandest legal career in American history' to life again in a masterfully researched and elegantly written volume."
--"The Boston Globe"
""Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned" is inpeccably researched, beautifully written, and timely...Farrell gives us Darrow in all his brilliance, hypocrisy, and eccentricity....As Farrell's riveting biography makes abundantly clear, there was no more powerful and incendiary thunderbolt than Clarence Darrow."
--"San Francisco Chronicle
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"A clear-sighted, empathetic biography....[Farrell] knows that he has a protagonist of Shakespearean richness and complexity, and this well-written, vividly atmospheric portrait captures Clarence Darrow with his faul