author
Annie Cooper Burton
A little-known early 20th-century writer, she is remembered for a 1916 book on the Ku Klux Klan that reflects the Lost Cause politics of its time. Very little biographical information about her has been confirmed, which makes the surviving record around her work especially striking.
1 Audiobook
The Ku Klux Klan
by Annie Cooper Burton
About the author
Annie Cooper Burton is known from the historical record mainly through her 1916 book The Ku Klux Klan. The surviving front matter of that book identifies her as president of the Wade Hampton Chapter No. 763 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Los Angeles, California.
Because so little reliable biographical detail is readily documented, it is hard to sketch a full personal life with confidence. What can be said is that her published work is tied closely to Confederate memorial culture and to a strongly sympathetic presentation of the Ku Klux Klan, making her a revealing figure for readers interested in how white supremacist ideas were defended and circulated in print in the early 1900s.
Today, Burton is less notable as a literary stylist than as a historical source for the attitudes and revisionist mythology surrounding the post-Civil War South. Readers often approach her work not as neutral history, but as evidence of the worldview it was written to promote.