Thomas Dixon

Author Code: ATDZ

Dixon was educated at Greensboro Law School and was admitted to the bar in 1886. He left law for the church and became a Baptist minister in 1889. His first novel, The Leopard's Spots appeared in 1902 and formed the first part of a trilogy about Reconstruction with The Clansman (1905) and The Traitor (1907). The Clansman was sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy and was used by D. W Griffith, a friend of Dixon, in the making of the groundbreaking film, The Birth of a Nation in 1915. Another of his controversial novels on the subject of race relations was The Flaming Sword (1939).