Jr. Thomas Dixon

Born in 1864 near Shelby, North Carolina, Thomas Dixon Jr. built an unusually varied career as a minister, lawyer, lecturer, legislator, novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. He studied at Wake Forest and Johns Hopkins, served briefly in the North Carolina legislature, and later became known as a powerful public speaker.

His fame came largely from fiction and drama. Novels such as The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman were widely read in the early 1900s, and The Clansman became the basis for The Birth of a Nation in 1915. Those works are now chiefly known for promoting white supremacist ideas and for their harmful portrayal of Reconstruction and Black Americans.

Dixon died in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1946. Today he remains an important but deeply troubling figure in American literary and film history, studied less for artistic achievement than for the influence his writing had on popular culture and racist propaganda.