When author and screenwriter Graham Moore set out to write his next novel, he knew he wanted to tell the story of business giant George Westinghouse’s 1880s battle with Thomas Edison over the patent for the lightbulb—but he didn’t know exactly how to frame the tale.
He found his answer in a single sentence buried deep in a biography on Westinghouse, which mentioned the legal advice Westinghouse received from a then-unknown, untested attorney named Paul Cravath. Recognizing a name that belongs to one of New York’s oldest firms, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Moore dug deeper. The result is “The Last Days of Night,” a work of historical fiction narrated by Paul Cravath that uses patent law, a subject seldom noted for its suspense value, as the backdrop for a clash of titans.
