Clarence Darrow For The Defense

A biography of the lawyer who devoted himself to unpopular causes and was involved in some of the most famous and important cases of the early twentieth century.

Life of the great criminal lawyer.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography The definitive biography of Clarence Darrow, the brilliant, idiosyncratic lawyer who defended John Scopes in the “Monkey Trial” and gave voice to the populist masses at the turn of the twentieth century, thus changing American law forever. Amidst the tumult of the industrial age and the progressive era, Clarence Darrow became America’s greatest defense attorney, successfully championing poor workers, blacks, and social and political outcasts, against big business, fundamentalist religion, Jim Crow, and the US government. His courtroom style—a mixture of passion, improvisation, charm, and tactical genius—won miraculous reprieves for men doomed to hang. In Farrell’s hands, Darrow is a Byronic figure, a renegade whose commitment to liberty led him to heroic courtroom battles and legal trickery alike.

A biography of the famous American lawyer, orator, and author that covers such historic trials as his defense of John Scopes, Eugene V. Debs, and Leopold-Loeb.