author
Landon Knight
Best known for The Real Jefferson Davis, this early 20th-century writer took a strongly sympathetic view of the Confederate president and wrote in a forceful, opinionated style. His work offers a revealing glimpse into how Jefferson Davis was defended and memorialized in that era.
1 Audiobook
The Real Jefferson Davis
by Landon Knight
About the author
Little reliable biographical information about Landon Knight was easy to confirm from major reference sources during this search, but his name is firmly connected with The Real Jefferson Davis, published in 1904 and now preserved in public-domain archives.
That book presents Jefferson Davis in an admiring, revisionist light, so Knight is best understood as a historical polemicist as much as a biographer. For modern listeners, his work can be interesting both for what it says about Davis and for what it reveals about the politics, memory, and rhetoric of the early 1900s.
Because confirmed personal details about Knight himself were limited in the sources reviewed, it is safest not to overstate his life story. What can be said with confidence is that his surviving reputation rests mainly on this controversial historical work.