Clarence Darrow ─ Attorney for the Damned

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.
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???? 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.

John Aloysius Farrell is the author of the highly acclaimed Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, which was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, received rave reviews from the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Boston Globe, and was a New York Times “Notable Book” and a Washington Post Book World “Rave of the Year.” He is a staff correspondent at National Journal magazine in Washington, D.C. Previously, he was Washington bureau chief for the Denver Post, served as Washington editor, White House correspondent for the Boston Globe, and was a senior writer at the Center for Public Integrity. He lives with his wife and two children in Washington.