An Eye for an Eye

Darrow, Clarence S. An Eye for an Eye. New York: Fox Duffield & Company, 1905. 213 pp. Reprinted 1996 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 99-047232. ISBN 1-886363-07-2. Cloth. An Eye for an Eye was Darrow's only fictional work, aside from his autobiographical novel, Farmington, published in 1904. It tells the story of Jim Jackson, who struggles with poverty and harsh circumstances, before finally murdering his wife in a fit of rage. Faced with the gallows, Jackson confesses: "If ther'd been forty scaffolds right before my eyes, I'd have brought down the poker just the same." Darrow's novel is a sociological polemic which foreshadows such later works as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Abe Ravitz in his Clarence Darrow and the American Literary Tradition (1962) observed that An Eye for an Eye was worthy of a trophy not only for sociological veracity but also for genuine literary achievement.