GCBC: Author Fundraiser Dinner with Scott Turow

GCBC Hosts Scott Turow for Fundraising Dinner and Discussion

Great Chicago Books Club will feature Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent on Sunday, Aug. 26 in Evanston. This event will help raise funds for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s continued programming throughout the course of this year, including our upcoming Fuller Award for lifetime achievement and our annual induction ceremony.

The author will join guests for a cocktail hour, dinner, and then discussion, in a lovely Queen Anne Victorian home built in 1890 by the well-known Chicago architectural firm Holabird and Roche. The current owners gut renovated the house in 2006 to bring back many of its original features, such as a Juliet balcony, leaded-glass windows, and a second-floor library. The original owner, Edwin Dawson, worked for the Pennsylvania railroad system, and when he retired in 1915 he was given a five-chime Westminster grandfather clock.  After an 80-year absence, the clock once again resides in this warm, welcoming home. 

Turow’s Presumed Innocent was his first novel, and its enormous success, both critically and commercially, launched the lawyer-author into the highest echelons of our nation’s literary elite.  The New York Times’ Adam Liptak, in a Sunday review of Identical, calls Turow’s Kindle County a “shadow version of greater Chicago, which he has been building and populating since he all but created the modern legal thriller in 1987 with Presumed Innocent.”

Turow is the author of 11 best-selling novels, including Presumed Innocent (1987) and The Burden of Proof (1990).  He has also written two non-fiction books—One L (1977) about his experience as a law student, and Ultimate Punishment (2003), a reflection on the death penalty. He has frequently contributed essays and op-ed pieces to publications such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Playboy and The Atlantic.  Turow’s books have won a number of literary awards, including the Heartland Prize in 2003 for Reversible Errors, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 2004 for Ultimate Punishment, and the Carl Sandburg Award in 2016.  His books have been translated into more than 25 languages and have sold more than 30 million copies world-wide. His novels have been translated into a number of films, including the movie, Presumed Innocent (1990), as well as two TV mini-series (Burden of Proof, 1992 and Reversible Errors, 2004) and a TV movie, Innocent (2011).  More recently, he has written three pilot scripts for TV. Turow continues to work as an attorney. He has been a partner in the Chicago office of Dentons (formerly Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal), an international law firm, since 1986, concentrating on white collar criminal defense, while also devoting a substantial part of his time to pro bono matters.  In one such case, he represented Alejandro Hernandez in the successful appeal that preceded Hernandez’s release after nearly twelve years in prison – including five on death row – for a murder he did not commit.

Registration, which is $200, is extremely limited. All of the seats will be sold in a matter of days, so if you want to participate in this fantastic event email Don Evans right away.