Awards

• Winner of L.A. Times Book Prize (Biography) 2011

Overview

"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 Now, John A. Farrell draws on previously unpublished correspondence and memoirs to offer a candid account of Darrow's divorce, affairs, and disastrous finances; new details of his feud with his law partner, the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. "" "" ""Clarence Darrow"" is a sweeping, surprising portrait of a leg-endary legal mind."

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9780385522588

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Reviews

Advance Praise for Clarence Darrow <br> John Farrell's Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned is a riveting historical drama filled with strange twists and turns. Every page is a triumph of scholarship. A marvelous biography! <br>--Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America<br> <br> It is almost impossible to conceive how so much living could have come in just one life, and Jack Farrell's masterful new biography makes Clarence Darrow come alive. This is a wonderful, at times heart-pounding story, told with precision, sympathy, and insight. <br>--Ken Burns <br> Clarence Darrow confounded titles: he was a freethinker, hedonist, anarchist, populist, infidel, cynic, and master storyteller who became our greatest lawyer and a folk hero. Farrell's masterful, sweeping new biography not only does justice to all his roles but joyously satisfies even a Darrow addict like me. <br>--Roy

<p>Praise for Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned<br> <br> Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned is inpeccably researched, beautifully written, and timely...Farrell gives us Farrow 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. <br>-- San Francisco Chronicle<br> <br> 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 faults and contradictions intact. <br>-- Los Angeles Times<br> <br> A comprehensive biography of the storied defense attorney. Making elaborate use of transcripts, observers' accounts, correspondence and newspaper reports, Farrell chronicles Darrow's most celebrated trials in detail.... These cases--including two in which Darrow, almost surely guilty, was himself tried

Author Information

"JOHN A. FARRELL wrote the acclaimed ""Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century."" He was the Washington editor of the ""Boston Globe ""and D.C. bureau chief of the ""Denver Post."" He lives in Washington, D.C."

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