SOURCE: Da Ponte, Durant. “The Greatest Play of the South.” Tennessee Studies in Literature 2 (1957): 15-24.

In the following essay, da Ponte reviews contemporary reaction to the dramatic adaptation of The Clansman.

Few people today remember his name. It is not to be found in such general and specialized works of reference as the current Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Dictionary of American Biography, The Literary History of the United States, or the volumes of Van Wyck Brooks. With the exception of Ernest E. Leisy, who devotes little more than a paragraph to him in The American Historical Novel, the other standard historians of American fiction give him only passing mention or ignore him altogether. And yet fifty years ago he was one of the most controversial figures on the American literary and social scene. Lawyer, politician, preacher, novelist, playwright, lecturer, actor, pamphleteer, rabble-rouser, and demagogue, he agitated troubled waters both...