A trial that comes close to meriting the designation "trial of the century," at least for its lasting impact on American culture, took place in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925. Two great advocates, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, struggled with one another in a test of the constitutionality of a recent state statute against the teaching of evolution in public schools. Both sides desired only one legal outcome at the trial: the conviction of John Scopes for teaching from George Hunter's "Civic Biology," a high school textbook that promoted Charles Darwin's "The Descent of Man." From the perspective of the ACLU attorneys who arranged and orchestrated the trial, Scopes' conviction would trigger an appeal that might overturn the Tennessee statute. As an icon of the triumph of science over religion, the Scopes trial would enter into the American imagination primarily through the trenchant, if selective, cynicism of that proto-curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken, who covered the trial for the Baltimore Sun, and later through the gross distortions of historical reality in "Inherit the Wind," the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, which became a hit film in 1960.

Edward Larson's training both in legal history and in the history of science serves him well in "Summer for the Gods," which was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history. With playful irony Larson borrows the title of his meticulous study from Darrow's autobiography, written seven years after the Scopes trial. Darrow immodestly referred to the event as the "summer for the gods," an odd designation either for a staunch agnostic like himself or for a devout monotheist like Bryan. Larson unearthed contemporary newspaper accounts of the trial and probed archival materials previously unexamined, including the archives of the ACLU, and the papers of Bryan, Darrow and Justice Abe Fortas. (A young Tennessean in 1925, Fortas followed the trial assiduously and was prompted by it to embark on a legal career that would lead in time to his service on the Supreme Court, where he wrote for the court in the Epperson case {1968}, invalidating an Arkansas law forbidding the teaching of evolution.)

We can be especially grateful to Larson for his rich contextualization of the principal characters, who emerge from this account as vivid and interesting, by no means the silly cartoon caricatures of "Inherit the Wind." For example, Larson paints a much more complex sketch of Bryan than the popular misconception of him as a Bible-thumping buffoon. Many of Bryan's assumptions, both biblical and scientific, are now outdated. His interpretation of the Bible was never literalist, but his lack of theological training made him vulnerable to following Darrow's bait down blind alleys. Bryan knew, moreover, of serious scientific difficulties with Darwinism, such as Darwin's positing that slight, random variations were enough to generate life from nonlife and to produce the current vast array of biological species. But Bryan mistook the lack of consensus about the particular mechanisms advanced by Darwin for a lack of scientific support for the general theory of organic evolution.