Life of the great criminal lawyer.

"Clarence Darrow For the Defense is an informative look at the life of attorney Clarence Darrow (1856-1938). Darrow left his well-paying job as attorney for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad to defend socialist labor leader Eugene Debs in the aftermath of Chicago's 1894 Pullman strike. As readers see, Darrow would then spend the next four decades defending other outcasts and unpopular causes. Darrow would defend labor activists and strikers, millionaire killers Leopold and Loeb, racial integration in Detroit (the Sweet Case), and the teaching of Evolution in Tennessee (Scopes Monkey trial). His opponents would include not only prosecutors, but law makers, ex-Presidential candidates like William Jennings Bryan, and very often enraged public opinion." -- Raptis Rare Books

In this buried chapter of American history, a nearly forgotten case of famed attorney Clarence Darrow comes hauntingly to the surface. In 1925 the NAACP approached Darrow to defend Ossian Sweet -- a highly respected black doctor who, after integrating an all-white neighborhood in Detroit, found himself the victim of a community attack. When Sweet and his family fought back, they were caught in a melee in which a white man was fatally shot. The trial that ensued, one of the most urgent and compelling in the nation's history, would test the basic tenets of the American Dream -- the right of a man to defend his own home. Tautly researched and harrowingly reported, One Man's Castle is an important slice of American legal history and the history of the civil rights (Kirkus Reviews).

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.