Scott Turow

Author

• Born: April 12, 1949
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

AMERICAN NOVELIST

Biography

Scott Turow is a successful Chicago attorney who has written best-selling fictional and nonfictional portrayals of the lives of lawyers and law students, which both entertain and grapple with important moral and ethical issues confronting the legal system. Turow received his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College in 1970 and his Master of Arts in 1974 from Stanford University.

When Turow entered Harvard University Law School in the fall of 1975, he wrote down his reflections and experiences on the pressures and stresses he and his fellow students were subjected to at this highly competitive and prestigious law school. His book analyzing these experiences was published in 1977 as One L and was immediately popular with both current and prospective law students, as well as with lawyers and the public. In many ways, Harvard Law School has long served as a model for legal education in the United States, and the portrayal of the experience there from a student perspective has encouraged much critical examination. While this first book was nonfiction, it was told as a story and was highly entertaining—a precursor to the author’s later success as a popular novelist.

Following Turow’s graduation from Harvard Law School in 1978, he returned to Chicago, where he was admitted to the Illinois Bar and worked as a criminal prosecutor, serving as an assistant US attorney from 1978 to 1986. Turow’s tenure at the US attorney’s office in Chicago had included the time frame in which a widely publicized federal government “sting” operation entitled Operation Greylord had resulted in the indictment and successful prosecution of many local judges for taking bribes, fixing cases, and other corrupt acts. During his term in that job, he began in his spare time (including on the train during his commute downtown to his job) to write on yellow legal pads, recording a gritty, realistic portrayal of the workings of a county prosecutor’s office. The resulting legal thriller, Presumed Innocent, was published in 1987 and became a bestseller. It is told in the first person by a male prosecutor who is ultimately charged with, prosecuted for, and then acquitted of the murder of a female colleague with whom he previously had an extramarital affair. In addition to the portrayal of the courtroom drama, the novel focuses on issues such as how local politics and individual ambition may influence the operation of the criminal justice system and issues of prosecutorial and judicial corruption. The novel was later the basis for a popular film starring Harrison Ford as the protagonist.

From the US attorney’s office Turow moved to a position as a private attorney at a large Chicago firm, Sonnenschein, Carlin, Nath, and Rosenthal, becoming a partner there in 1986. He subsequently published The Burden of Proof in 1990, a novel in which the first-person narrator and protagonist is a private criminal defense lawyer (the same attorney who defended the accused prosecutor in Presumed Innocent) who is confronted with the initially inexplicable suicide of his wife. Conflicting duties and loyalties of this lawyer then arise out of the local US attorney’s investigation into the financial affairs of a major client of his, who is also his brother-in-law. This novel was later made into a television miniseries. Turow’s third novel, Pleading Guilty (1993), focuses on a large private law firm’s internal investigation of the suspected embezzlement of lawsuit settlement funds by one of its partners. The novel weaves a complex tale involving the past career of the narrator (the lawyer assigned by the firm to investigate the missing funds) as a police officer who exposed his own partner’s corruption, the hidden personal life of the suspected embezzler (who engaged in a homosexual love affair with a sports referee and then became involved in a gambling scheme involving the games at which his lover was officiating), and the involvement of an officer of the law firm’s largest client in an offshore banking attempt to hide the stolen funds.

The Laws of Our Fathers (1996) revisits the character Sonia Klonsky from The Burden of Proof; now a Superior Court judge, she is presiding over the murder trial of a young Black man accused of arranging the death of his mother, a community activist. Personal Injuries (1999) entails an elaborate Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sting operation that uses a corrupt lawyer who has been bribing judges to entrap an even more corrupt judge who is believed to be next in line to become chief justice of Kindle County. Reversible Errors (2002) contrasts the reactions of two couples when the innocence of a convicted murderer comes to light: one pair are former lovers, the prosecuting attorney and police officer who conspired to convict the man; the other is his court-appointed defense attorney, and the now-disgraced judge who heard the case.

Turow’s first six novels take place in a fictional Kindle County in Illinois—smaller than Cook County, Illinois, but still a large metropolis. Because some characters, geographic locales, and backgrounds reappear, readers of Turow’s novels have the feeling of returning to familiar terrain. The novels present a full-bodied and complex portrayal of life in the urban legal community. The popularity of the books among the general public, but even more so among the legal community, is due in no small measure to their portrayals of lawyers as multifaceted, real persons with complex personal lives and dilemmas that are not always amenable to easy solutions.

For Turow's second nonfiction work, Ultimate Punishment (2003), he took on the controversial topic of the death penalty. In addition to providing a history of capital punishment and the debate surrounding it, he incorporates his own experience with the death penalty as a criminal lawyer and how his views have changed over the years. Returning to fiction with his 2005 novel Ordinary Heroes, he departed from his usual focus on criminal justice to explore familial relationships and the effects of war as Stewart Dubinsky tries to understand his father's past and involvement in World War II. With the publication of Limitations (2006) the following year, he went back to the familiar territory of the legal mystery, this time following the character George Mason from Personal Injuries as he struggles with serving as the judge for a disturbing rape case. In 2010, more than twenty years after the publication of Presumed Innocent, Turow published Innocent, which serves as a sequel to the original bestseller. Identical (2013) added to Turow's reputation as a successful and popular mystery and suspense writer, telling the tale of a set of identical twins wrapped up in a reopened investigation regarding a murder that had occurred twenty-five years prior.

In addition to serving as the president of the Authors Guild from 2010 to 2014, Turow has also spoken out about issues facing authors in the digital age and some of Amazon's practices as the leading digital retailer. Turow continues to publish, adding Testimony (2017), The Last Trial (2020), and Suspect (2022) to his collection of works. Although Suspect introduces a new storyline and protagonist, the novel's setting remains in Kindle County. Turow also remains involved in the Illinois legal community, working as a criminal litigator and often offering pro bono legal work for capital cases. He serves on the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission. 

Bibliography

Ahley, Mark. Modern Crime Fiction: The Authors, Their Works, and Their Most Famous Creations. New York: Carroll, 2002.

Bennett, Julie K. “The Trials of a Novelist.” North Shore, vol. 10.9, 1987.

Charney, Noah. “Scott Turow: How I Write.” The Daily Beast, 23 Oct. 2013, www.thedailybeast.com/scott-turow-how-i-write. Accessed 10 July 2024.

D’Amato, Barbara. “Chicago as a Mystery Setting.” In The Fine Art of Murder: The Mystery Reader’s Indispensable Companion. Edited by Edward Gorman, Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, and Jon L. Breen. New York: Carroll, 1993.

Diggs, Terry K. “Through a Glass Darkly.” American Bar Association Journal, vol. 82, 1996.

Doyle, James M. “‘It’s the Third World down There!’ The Colonialist Vocation and American Criminal Justice.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, vol. 27, 1992.

Gray, Paul. “Burden of Success: As a High-Powered Lawyer and Novelist, Scott Turow Has Become the Bard of the Litigious Age.” Time 11 June 1990.

Lundy, Derek. Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy. Toronto: ECW, 1995.

Macdonald, Andrew F., and Gina Macdonald. Scott Turow: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 2005.

Murphy, Stephen M. Their Word Is Law: Bestselling Lawyer-Novelists Talk About Their Craft. New York: Berkley, 2002.

Watson, Jay. “Making Do in the Courtroom: Notes on Some Convergences Between Forensic Practice and Bricolage.” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society Annual, vol. 14, 1994.

Woods, Paula L., and Scott Turow. “Review: Scott Turow Has a New Millennial Heroine in 'Suspect.'” Los Angeles Times, 26 Sept. 2022, www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2022-09-26/review-in-his-latest-thriller-scott-turow-tries-to-learn-some-new-tricks. Accessed 10 July 2024.