Earl Rogers

Earl Rogers (November 18, 1869 – February 22, 1922) was an American trial lawyer and professor. Rogers became the inspiration for Erle Stanley Gardner's fictional character Perry Mason. He was posthumously inducted into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame.

Life Earl Rogers was born in Perry, New York on November 18, 1869, the son of Methodist minister Lowell L. Rogers and Ada (Andrus) Rogers. The Reverend Rogers moved the Rogers family to California in 1874. Rogers attended Ashland Academy in Ashland, Oregon and St. Helena Academy in St. Helena, California. He studied at Syracuse University, but left to return to California after his father went bankrupt.

Rogers had wanted to be a surgeon; by his late teens Rogers was married and working as a Los Angeles newspaper reporter. This brought him into contact with the courts, and he began reading law under former U.S. senator Stephen M. White and Judge William P. Gardiner. Rogers was admitted to the bar in 1897, and began to practice in Los Angeles. Rogers did not like criminal law because it was less prestigious than civil practice; out of 183 acquittals over his career with fewer than 20 convictions, even though most of his clients were actually guilty. In 1927 she published A Free Soul, a novel where the lawyer-hero wins his most famous case and dies collapsing on the courtroom floor in triumph. The book had appeared in serial form from September 1926 to February 1927 in Hearst's International with Cosmopolitan magazine, and also resulted in a 1928 play and A Free Soul, a 1931 film of the same name, starring Lionel Barrymore with Clark Gable as a gangster. It was voted "One of the Ten Best Pictures of 1931" in a poll by Film Daily.

The California attorney and author Erle Stanley Gardner published his first Perry Mason pulp-fiction story in 1933, inspired by the success and techniques of Rogers, but filled with details and locations from Gardner's life. The character appeared in more than 80 novels by Gardner, as well as Warner Brothers feature films in the 1930's, a CBS Radio program from 1943 to 1955, and a CBS Television program beginning in 1957.

His daughter Adela published a biography of her father in 1962 titled Final Verdict. It was adapted for a TNT television film of the same name in 1991.