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Now, John A. Farrell draws on previously unpublished correspondence and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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"Darrow is a gargantuan figure, every bit as amazing as his reputation, and this is a wonderfilled biography. Darrow is skeptical, generous and venal, idealistic and cynical, shrewd and reckless, oversexed and loving, progressive and corrupt: a plethora of personality traits tumbling out upon an amazing event-filled life. But if that just seems like a grab bag of random characteristics, Farrell writes with a deft precision, and a fine attention to detail, as well as allowing ample space for Darrow to unleash his intellect in pure torrents of speech, recreating rich as life the events surrounding his most famous legal cases. Somehow, it all comes together, and all these disparate parts seem to justly form the measure of the man. And despite his near nihilism, the one characteristic that seems to explain him best is a horror of death, which informed him with a terrible pity and compassion for his fellow creatures, a hatred of executions and persecution, greed and prejudice, all of which seem hopelessly vindictive in the shadow of the grave."
—
Ed (5 out of 5 stars)