An Interview with Scott Turow

AN INTERVIEW WITH SCOTT TUROW Scott Turow O 1987 Tom Victor The foUowing interview with Scott Turow was conducted at Mr. Turow's law offices in April of 1989 by Kay Bonetti, Director of the American Audio Prose Library. Mr. Turow is the author of One L and the best-seUing novel, Presumed Innocent. His new book, The Burden of Proof, is scheduled for publication this spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. An Interview with Scott Turow/Kay Bonetti Interviewer: Mr. Turow, can you teU us just a Uttle bit about yourself? As I understand it, you Uve in Chicago now and you're a hometown boy. Turow: I was born in Chicago, grew up on the north side of the city. I was thirteen when my parents moved to Winnetka, which is one of the most affluent areas outside Chicago. I went to New Trier high school, sometimes described as a pubUc prep school, and from there to Amherst CoUege as an undergraduate, then Stanford for grad school. At Stanford I was a writing feUow for two years, and then a lecturer in the EngUsh Department for three. I went to law school in 1975, and began practicing law in 1978, which Tm stiU doing whUe attempting to write. Interviewer: I understand that you studied writing at Amherst under TUUe Olsen? Turow: I studied with a number of people. There was no formal writing program at Amherst and so I tried to cadge whatever advice I could from anybody I could find, and TUUe was enormously influential, the first person who reaUy took me seriously as a writer. I also owe a substantial debt of gratitude to Leo Marx, who's a great scholar of American Studies, and David Sofield, whose poetry appears now and then in the New Yorker. He was not writing pubUcly at that time, but was kind enough to encourage me. Interviewer: Is that the Leo Marx of The Machine and the Garden? Turow: It's the Leo Marx of The Machine and the Garden. He's a great teacher and a good friend. The Missouri Review · 103 Interviewer: At what point did you know you wanted to write? Turow: To some extent, most of my Ufe. My mother has always harbored ambitions to be a writer, and the first recoUection I have of writing anything was when I was in about the seventh grade. I pretended to write a novel, but the novel I was pretending to write was virtuaUy plagiarized from something that I had read at school. In my junior year in high school, I became involved with the school newspaper, and ultimately became editor. That rekindled my interest in writing, but when I went to Amherst I decided that I wasn't going to be a mere journaUst. I wanted to be an artiste and a writer of fiction, and I began writing seriously then. I finished my first novel by the end of my first year in coUege. I talk, you know, with a humorous kind of pejorativeness about it. The book was not terrible. It was caUed Dithyramb, which is a Greek word, the meaning of which I don't reaUy fuUy recaU. It was about two young men from the north side of Chicago who run away from home and, Uke Huck and Jim, go down the Mississippi to New Orleans where they witness the murder of a black prostitute in those "bad old days" in the South, this being set in the midnineteen sixties. The novel had certain problems, however, one of which was that I had never been to New Orleans, and so the book, to say the least, was somewhat lacking in atmosphere. Interviewer: This is the novel you worked on at Amherst? Turow: It was roundly rejected by pubUshers whUe I was at Amherst. I went on to other things. Interviewer: Did your teachers see it? Turow: Nobody saw it. I think the only serious and appreciative reader that Dithyramb had was my girl friend at the time. 104 · The Missouri Review Scoff Turow "My main vein . . .is trying to make sense out offairly unusual events/' Interviewer: You did pubüsh a short story...