The Clansman

The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is the 1905 novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1946) that became the most consequential and most condemned American popular novel of its era. The second book of Dixon’s Reconstruction trilogy, it presents the post-Civil War South from a white Southern viewpoint that romanticises the first Ku Klux Klan, and it supplied the story for D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, the most commercially successful and most protested film of the silent era. The novel’s racist portrayal of Reconstruction was contested by Black writers and historians from publication onward and has been thoroughly discredited by modern scholarship. The book is read today as a primary source for the history of American racism and the Lost Cause mythology it helped spread. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.