SOURCE: Clark, Thomas D. Introduction to The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, by Thomas Dixon, Jr., pp. v-xviii. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970.

In the following introduction to a reprint of The Clansman, Clark places the novel in its historical context.

The first thing to be said in discussing Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s novel The Clansman is that no person of critical judgment thinks of it as having artistic conception or literary craftsmanship. One can readily agree with the opinion of the reviewer for the Bookman in February 1905, when he wrote, “The Clansman may be summed up as a very poor novel, a very ridiculous novel, not a novel at all, yet a novel with a great deal to it; a novel that very properly is going to interest many thousands of readers, of all degrees of taste and education, a book which will...