A history of the landmark case of James Earl Gideon's fight for the right to legal counsel. Notes, table of cases, index. The classic backlist bestseller. More than 800,000 sold since its first pub date of 1964.

Anthony Lewis is a columnist for the New York Times. He was previously its Chief London Correspondent and before that was in the Times Washington Bureau, covering the Supreme Court and the Justice Department. Mr. Lewis was born in 1927 in New York City. After graduating from Harvard in 1948, he spent four years with the Sunday department of the New York Times and then became a general assignment reporter for the Washington Daily News. While working for the News he won a Pulitzer Prize for national correspondence and the Heywood Broun Award in 1955 for a series of stories on the Federal loyalty-security program. He was a Nieman Fellow in 1956-1957. In 1963 he won a second Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Supreme Court. He is the co-author, with the New York Times, of Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution. Mr. Lewis makes his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.