Keeping the Faith

“It had everything—the clash of science and faith, dueling celebrity lawyers, intense media interest. The Scopes trial remains resonant in our own time, and Brenda Wineapple’s wonderful account of how tiny Dayton, Tennessee, became the site of a vital skirmish in the wars of modernity sheds light not only on the battles of the past but on the unfolding struggles of the urgent present.”—Jon Meacham

“In this propulsive account of the 1925 Scopes trial, Wineapple documents the antecedents that led to it and how the trial exposed fault lines in America that continue to haunt us. Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan emerge as complicated and fascinating characters who embody different versions of American democracy. Keeping The Faith is a terrific story about a pivotal moment in our history and a book that illuminates the conflicts we are seeing in our country today.”—Ken Burns

“Much of what we think we know about the famous ‘Scopes trial,’ we don't. Our misconceptions need correction; and there is no better corrector than Brenda Wineapple.”—Garry Wills, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg and What the Qur’an Meant

“Brenda Wineapple makes the most of a magnificent cast—Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, H.L. Mencken—to bring to life a drama that captivated the nation a century ago. ‘Democracy was on trial,’ she writes—then as now. A master of historical narrative, Wineapple has given us a bracing and illuminating tale for our own troubled times.”—Evan Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of Road to Surrender

“This new account of the Scopes trial and the forces that propelled it is so timely as to be almost eerie in its relevance. In Brenda Wineapple’s hands, a century-old event opens a window on where we are as a country today, when the impulse to label certain ideas as too dangerous to be taught is as powerful now as it was when Tennessee made it a crime to teach about evolution.”—Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer-Prize winning legal journalist

“Brenda Wineapple brings the past to life with her compelling rendition of the extravaganza that was the Scopes Trial and with her vivid portraits of Darrow and Bryan, its jousting antagonists. But her book speaks chillingly to the present as well as she recounts a battle about science, religion, truth, and freedom of thought that seems much closer than a century ago.”—Drew Gilpin Faust, New York Times bestselling author of Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

“Keeping the Faith is a brilliant account of the Scopes trial, as fair minded as it is well-written, as compelling as it is richly detailed—and as relevant to today’s America as it is faithful to the America of a century ago. [The] vivid, nuanced portraits of its two great protagonists, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, are unforgettable.”—Geoffrey C. Ward, author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt