Monkey Town: The Summer of the Scopes Trial is a 2006 novel written by American author Ronald Kidd. The story is set in summer 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee

Dayton, Tennessee

Dayton is a city in Rhea County, Tennessee, United States. The population was 6,180 at the 2000 census. The Dayton, TN, Urban Cluster, which includes developed areas adjacent to the city and extends south to Graysville, Tennessee, had 9,050 people in 2000...

 and is based on the Scopes Trial

Scopes Trial

The Scopes Trial—formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and informally known as the Scopes Monkey Trial—was a landmark American legal case in 1925 in which high school science teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act which made it unlawful to...

.

Plot summary

Frances Robinson, a fifteen-year-old daydreamer, lives in Dayton, a small town in Tennessee

Tennessee

Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...

. When the summer starts, she wants only to play tennis and drink Coke. However, things bounce out of normal range when her father, the school board chairman, arrests local teacher (and Frances' friend and love interest) John Scopes for teaching Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

's evolution theory in class, in an effort to attract publicity to the town. Scopes is put on trial. Frances takes Scopes' side and defies her father, even though the case is not completely genuine.

Notable names such as politician William Jennings Bryan

William Jennings Bryan

William Jennings Bryan was an American politician in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. He was a dominant force in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as its candidate for President of the United States...

 (prosecutor of Scopes), lawyer Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow

Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks and defending John T...

 (defender of Scopes), and journalist H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken

Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the...

arrive in Dayton, along with a horde of reporters, and drama stirs.

Main characters

• Frances Robinson : Fifteen-year-old daydreamer whose father arrests John Scopes for teaching evolution. She sides with Scopes, who is her secret crush.
• John Scopes : Schoolteacher who is arrested for teaching evolution in a trial that aimed to attract attention to small town Dayton, Tennessee.
• Mr. Robinson : Frances' dad. He starts the Scopes Trial because he wants to attract publicity to Dayton.
• William Jennings Bryan : Prosecutor of John Scopes. Bryan was an American politician.
• Clarence Darrow : Defendant for John Scopes. Darrow was an American lawyer.
• H. L. Mencken : Journalist, essayist, and critic. Mencken arrived in Scopes when the trial took place to record the events.