The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

Thomas Dixon, Jr., born during the Civil War, was a lawyer, North Carolina state legislator, Baptist minister, lecturer, and novelist. His novel The Clansman, originally published in 1905, reflects turn of the century attitudes most white southerners still had about Republica rule during Reconstruction. Although The Clansman clearly twisted the truth of many historical events, it is an accurate and faithful representation of a dominant attitude southerners - and northerners as well - had about those events. The novel was made into the classic D.W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation in 1915, indelibly impressing these attitudes on the twentieth-century American mind. The novel creates clearly defined heroes and villains, and is replete with exciting chase scenes, narrow escapes, daring rescues, and trag heart-rending deaths. Behind the action are several romantic subplots designed to make the author’s political message go down easier. This version is an abridgement by Cary Wintz, who also supplies an introduction summarizing the passages he has deleted and offering background information about the author, the time period, the plot, and a guide to the characters to enable modern students to read and understand this hard-to-find novel.