Book excerpt: " Thomas Dixon is perhaps best known as the author of the best-selling early twentieth-century Klan trilogy that included the novel The Clansman (1905), which provided the core narrative for D.W. Griffith's groundbreaking and still controversial film The Birth of a Nation (1915). In his twenty-eighth and last novel, The Flaming Sword (1939), Dixon takes to task his long-standing black critics, especially W.E.B. DuBois, by attacking what he considered to be a vast conspiracy by blacks and Communists to destroy America. A new introduction and detailed notes by John David Smith offer a valuable historical and critical perspective on this important and divisive classic of American literature. Thomas Dixon (1864-1946) was born in Shelby, North Carolina. He is the author of The Clansman and The Sins of the Father.