In 1894 Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938) resigned from his lucrative job as chief counsel for the Chicago and North Western Railway to defend, without fee, Eugene V. Debs, president of the nascent American Railway Union. This bold action,the first of many,marked the beginning of one of the most extraordinary and influential legal careers in American history.

• * Before the Beginning * My Childhood Kinsman * At the Threshold of Life * Called to the Bar * I Make A Hit * Getting On * The Railroad Strike * Eugene V. Debs * How I Fell * Child Training * I Meet Mr. Bryan * Pardoning the Anarchists * John P. Altgeld * The Coal Strike * A Flier in Politics * The Skeleton in the Forest * The Athens of the Sage-Brush * The Haywood Trial * Still Rattling the Skeleton * In Search of a Germ * The McNamara Case * Lights and Shadows * George Bisset * Back to Chicago * War * The Aftermath of the War * The Loeb-Leopold Trial * The Evolution Case * Science versus Fundamentalism * The Bryan Foundation * A Dry America * The Eighteenth Amendment * The Negro in the North * A Year in Europe * Learning to Loaf * The Campaign Against Crime * Cause and Effect * The Blind Leading the Blind * Why Capital Punishment? * A New Habit * Questions Without Answers * Future Life * Delusion of Design and Purpose * The Law as it Is * Slowing Down * Toward the End of the Trail * The Massie Trial