Early Praise
"People want heroes. But history demands truth. This gritty biography demystifies a deeply flawed
legal hero, who 'almost assuredly' bribed jurors and witnesses in order to level the playing field
against`the rich and powerful.' Darrow was a giant of his corrupt times. His biography is a must
read for all Americans who care about both the means and ends of justice!" —Alan M. Dershowitz
"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, which is told with precision, sympathy and insight." —Ken Burns
About the Book
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Clarence Darrow lived to take on big, lost, unpopular causes. Murderers. Socialists. Anarchists. The innocent and guilty. Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned is the first full documented life of our greatest defense attorney, who championed the common man and forged the heroic archetype of the American lawyer.
At 36, in tumultuous Gilded Age Chicago, Clarence Darrow left a promising career as a railroad lawyer and made a name for himself defending the nation’s outcasts. His days-long closing arguments delivered without notes won miraculous reprieves for men doomed to hang. He became famous defending union leader Eugene Debs, in the landmark Pullman Strike case, and Big Bill Haywood, the brawling, one-eyed labor leader on trial for assassinating Idaho’s governor. He defended the McNamara brothers, charged with bombing the Los Angeles Times building, and the notorious young thrill killers, Leopold and Loeb. And in one mythic week in 1925, he cemented his place in history defending John Scopes in the famous Monkey Trial, facing off against William Jennings Bryant in the classic showdown over the teaching of evolution.
In Darrow’s lifetime, America made its transformation from agrarian innocence to the sins of industrial capitalism. Darrow stood for the working men and women being crushed by relentless economic forces. In the courtroom, he forged an American archetype, speaking with plain, emotional conviction of the nobility of mankind and the threat to liberty posed by men of wealth and their legal guns-for-hire. In his private life, too, Darrow challenged conventionality. He had no faith in God, or religion, or right and wrong - and said so. At mid-career, he found himself fighting for his reputation, his law license and his freedom when he was put on trial himself, for bribing two jurors.
For this first full biography of Darrow to appear in thirty years, John A. Farrell has drawn on archives and collections never tapped by a biographer, including hundreds of Darrow's private letters. 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. Farrell offers a thrilling and revelatory account of Darrow’s headline-making trials, his love affairs and disastrous finances; his feud with his law partner, poet Edgar Lee Masters; his representation of mobsters, psychopaths, crooked pols, and murderous scorned women; and his final defiance of fascism and totalitarianism.
Chronicling decades in which America was virtually remade, Clarence Darrow is a sweeping, turbulent portrait of an American legend.
