Thomas Dixon Jr.

Thomas Dixon Jr. was a Baptist minister, a North Carolina legislator, a lawyer and a touring lecturer before he was a novelist, and what he wrote was propaganda. The Leopard's Spots in 1902, The Clansman in 1905 and The Traitor in 1907 form a trilogy on Reconstruction in which Black Americans are presented as a danger to be contained and the Ku Klux Klan as the rescuers of a violated South. The Clansman travelled far past its own readership: D. W. Griffith filmed it as The Birth of a Nation in 1915, the first American blockbuster, and that film is generally credited with reviving a Klan which had been dormant for forty years. Dixon also wrote The Sins of the Father, The Southerner, Comrades and The Root of Evil, and produced films of his own, among them The Fall of a Nation. He lived from 1864 to 1946. The books are studied now as evidence of how that account of Reconstruction was manufactured and spread.