Thomas Dixon Jr.

Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864–1946) was an American novelist, playwright, Baptist minister and lecturer from North Carolina. After careers in law, politics and the pulpit, he turned to fiction with The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), novels of Reconstruction that glorified the Ku Klux Klan and that D. W. Griffith adapted into the film The Birth of a Nation in 1915; their racism has made Dixon's name notorious. He wrote more than twenty further novels, including The One Woman, Comrades and The Fall of a Nation, as well as plays and film scripts. The Sun Virgin (1929), a romance of Pizarro's conquest of Peru, was among his last books.