Content Warning: This section of the guide includes graphic discussions of racism, violence motivated by racism, alcohol addiction, suicide, domestic violence, and multiple acts of sexual assault, including rape.

A former reporter with The New York Times, Egan brings a journalist’s eye for detail and a fiction writer’s sense of narrative to his tale of D. C. Stephenson and his rapid rise to power. He not only incorporates meticulous research—he cites directly from “court testimony, oral histories, autobiographies, letters, diaries, and newspaper quotes” (i)—but he augments it with the literary devices of fiction—setting, dialogue, and character—to create an account of Stephenson’s rise and fall. The author of nine previous books, Egan has won a host of awards, including the National Book Award and, in 2001, the Pulitzer Prize for his co-reporting in a series for The New York Times, “How Race is Lived in America.”

As he endeavors to recreate historical events, Egan forgoes his journalist’s objectivity to depict a struggle of good versus evil, tolerance versus hate: Madge Oberholtzer is a martyr to the cause of justice, and O’Donnell and Dale are depicted as noble crusaders crushed under the wheels of the Klan’s powerful political machine.