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Scott Turow

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For Polish place names, see Turów (disambiguation).
Scott Turow, January 2008

Scott Frederick Turow[1] (born April 12, 1949) is an American author and a practicing lawyer. Turow has written nine fiction and two nonfiction books, which have been translated into over 20 languages and have sold over 25 million copies. Movies have been based on several of his books.

Life and career

Turow was born in Chicago, to a family of Russian Jewish descent.[2] He attended New Trier High School, and graduated from Amherst College in 1970, as a Brother of the Alpha Delta Phi Literary Society. He received an Edith Mirrielees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he attended from 1970 to 1972. In 1971, he married Annette Weisberg, a painter. They divorced thirty-five years later.

Scott Turow later became a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, serving until 1975, when he entered Harvard Law School. In 1977, Turow wrote One L, a book about his first year at law school. After earning his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1978, Turow became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago, serving in that position until 1986. There he prosecuted several high-profile corruption cases, including the tax fraud case of state Attorney General William Scott. Turow also was lead counsel in Operation Greylord, the federal prosecution of Illinois judicial corruption cases.

After leaving the U.S. Attorney's office, Turow became a novelist, beginning to write legal thrillers starting with The Burden of Proof, Presumed Innocent, Pleading Guilty, and Personal Injuries, which Time magazine named as the Best Fiction Novel of 1999. All four became bestsellers, and Turow won multiple literary awards, most notably the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers' Association.

In these Kindle County novels, many of the characters appear in more than one book. The state is unspecified, but the books tell that the county contains a tri-city conglomerate on the Kindle River, a river that flows eventually into the Mississippi, somewhere between Chicago and New Orleans [Burden of Proof Chapter 3]; compare the "Quad Cities" on the Mississippi, originally Davenport IA, Rock Island IL, Moline IL, and East Moline IL, but now also including Bettendorf IA. There are also some similarities with the Twin Cities on the Mississippi, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Like the Twin Cities, the Tri-Cities are part of a conurbation of about three million people, and the predominant political party there is the Democratic Farmers-and-Union Party (DFU), whose name resembles that of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) in Minnesota.

In 1990, Turow was featured on the June 11 cover of Time, which described him as "Bard of the Litigious Age".[3] In 1995, Canadian author Derek Lundy published a biography of Turow, entitled Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy (ECW Press, 1995). In the 1990s a British publisher bracketed Turow’s work with that of Margaret Atwood and John Irving, republished in the series Bloomsbury Modern Library.

Turow was elected the president of the Authors Guild in 2010[4] and was previously president from 1997 to 1998.[citation needed] As the Authors Guild president he has been criticized for his copyright maximalist and anti-ebook stance.[5]

From 1997 to 1998 Turow was a member of the U.S. Senate Nominations Commission for the Northern District of Illinois, which recommends federal judicial appointments. In 2011, Turow met with Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig to discuss political reform including a possible Second Constitution of the United States; according to one source, Turow saw risks with having such a convention, but believed that it may be the "only alternative" given how campaign money has undermined the one-man-one-vote principle of democracy.[6]

Turow is a partner of the international law firm Dentons having been a partner of one of its constituents, the Chicago law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. Turow works pro bono in most of his cases, including a 1995 case where he won the release of Alejandro Hernandez, who had spent 11 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. He was also appointed to the commission considering the reform of the Illinois death penalty by former Governor George Ryan and is currently a member of the Illinois State Police Merit Board.

Books

File:Scott Turow, Miami Book Fair International, 1993.jpg
Turow at the Miami Book Fair International, 1993

Fiction

Non-fiction

Reception

His non-fiction novel Ultimate Punishment also received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 2003 Book award given annually to a novelist who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes - his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity."[8]

Films

See also

References

  1. ^ "Scott Frederick Turow". Cookcountyclerk.com. 1949-12-04. Retrieved 2013-04-09.
  2. ^ "Scott Turow: a critical companion - Andrew F. MacDonald, Gina Macdonald - Google Books". Books.google.ca. 1949-04-12. Retrieved 2013-04-09.
  3. ^ "Burden of Success". TIME. 135 (24). Time Inc. 1990-06-11. Retrieved 2009-03-29.
  4. ^ http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/scott-turow-elected-president-of-the-authors-guild/?src=busln
  5. ^ "Authors Guild's Scott Turow: The Supreme Court, Google, Ebooks, Libraries & Amazon Are All Destroying Authors". Techdirt. Retrieved 2013-04-09.
  6. ^ JAMES WARREN of The Chicago News Cooperative (December 10, 2011). "Let's Do Something About Privilege, Donors, Corporations and the Constitution". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-01-23.
  7. ^ "Hard Listening".
  8. ^ . RFKcenter.org http://rfkcenter.org/book-award?lang=en. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

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