The Sins of the Father

The Sins of the Father: A Romance of the South is a 1912 novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1946), a melodrama of miscegenation and its consequences set in the post-Reconstruction South. The story centres on a North Carolina politician and newspaper editor whose secret relationship with a mixed-race woman brings ruin upon his family in the next generation, as Dixon works out his obsessive theme of racial separation through a plot of concealed parentage and doomed courtship. The novel was developed from Dixon’s own stage play and was filmed in 1928. Like all Dixon’s racial fiction it is read today not as literature but as a primary source for the white-supremacist ideology of the Jim Crow South at its most explicit. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.