Scott Frederick Turow is an American author and lawyer. Turow has written 11 fiction and three nonfiction books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Films have been based on several of his books.
Life and career
Turow was born in Chicago, to a family of Russian Jewish descent. 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 Stanford University’s Creative Writing Center, where he attended from 1970 to 1972. 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 degreecum laude 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 GeneralWilliam 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 and wrote the legal thrillers Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof, 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 1990, Turow was featured on the June 11 cover of Time, which described him as "Bard of the Litigious Age". In 1995, Canadian author Derek Lundy published a biography of Turow, entitled Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy. 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, and was previously president from 1997 to 1998. As the Authors Guild president he has been criticized for his copyright maximalist and anti-ebook stance. Turow has often responded that he is not against E-books and does the majority of his own reading electronically. His goal, he said often, is to protect writing as a livelihood. 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. 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 GovernorGeorge Ryan. He was the first Chair of Illinois' Executive Ethics Commission. He served as one of the 14 members of the Commission appointed in March, 2000, by Illinois Governor George Ryan to consider reform of the capital punishment system. Turow also served as a member of the Illinois State Police Merit Board 2000–2002.
Hard Listening, co-authored in July 2013, an interactive ebook about his participation in a writer/musician band, the Rock Bottom Remainders. Published by Coliloquy, LLC.
Reception
His non-fiction work 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."
