The Root of Evil

The Root of Evil is a 1911 novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1946) attacking Wall Street finance and the worship of money in Gilded Age New York. The story follows a young Southern lawyer in the city who watches the woman he loves marry a financier’s fortune, and traces the corrosion that money-hunger works on families, marriages, and public life, building to a financial panic engineered by the novel’s predatory capitalist. Dixon wrote the book during the muckraking decade, and it shares the anti-plutocratic mood of the era’s popular fiction while keeping his characteristic melodramatic plotting. The novel shows Dixon working outside his Reconstruction subjects, applying his sensational style to the economic anxieties of the Progressive Era. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.