author
Victor Rubin
b. 1892
A little-known early 20th-century novelist and journalist, he wrote fiction that tackled prejudice and public life head-on. His best-known book, Tar and Feathers, is a pointed postwar story that puts the Ku Klux Klan and racial intolerance at the center of its drama.
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About the author
Born in 1892, Victor Rubin was an American writer whose surviving public record is slim but suggestive. Library and public-domain catalog records confirm him as the author of Tar and Feathers (published in 1923, with a 1924 edition) and The Destruction of a Nation (1921, with Jacob H. Rubin).
A later bookseller description, summarizing an obituary, says Rubin had been a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and the Chicago Herald-Examiner and remained interested in American history throughout his life. That matches the strong historical and political focus of the work that is easiest to verify today.
Rubin seems to be remembered chiefly for Tar and Feathers, a novel presented as a fact-based postwar romance in which the Ku Klux Klan figures prominently. Even from the title page alone, it is clear he was writing into the anxieties and conflicts of the early 1920s, using popular fiction to engage with questions of intolerance, identity, and public conscience.