Anthony Slide
American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon.
The University Press of Kentucky, 2004. First printing. 0813123283 x/242 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.5", is bound in gilt-lettered quarter black cloth and red paper-covered boards. Book and dust jacket are new. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
""Thomas Dixon has a notorious reputation as the writer of the source material for D.W. Griffith's groundbreaking and controversial 1915 feature film "The Birth of a Nation." Perhaps unfairly, Dixon has been branded an arch-conservative and a racist obsessed with what he viewed as "the Negro problem." As "American Racist" makes clear, however, Dixon was a complex, multitalented individual who, as well as writing some of the most popular novels of the early twentieth century, was involved in the production of some eighteen films. Dixon used the motion picture as a propaganda tool for his often outrageous opinions on race, communism, socialism, and feminism. His most spectacular production, "The Fall of a Nation" (1916), argues for American preparedness in the face of war and boasts a musical score by Victor Herbert, making it the first American feature film to have an original score by a major composer. Like the majority of Dixon's films, "The Fall of a Nation" has been lost, but had it survived, it might well have taken its place alongside "The Birth of a Nation" as a masterwork of silent film. Anthony Slide examines each of Dixon's films and discusses the novels from which they were adapted. Slide chronicles Dixon's transformation from a major supporter of the original Ku Klux Klan in his early novels to an ardent critic of the modern Klan in his last film, "Nation Aflame." "American Racist" is the first book to discuss Dixon's work outside of literature and provide a wide overview of the life and career of this highly controversial twentieth-century southern populist."