A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan

A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction * An NPR Best Book of the Year * A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year * A Chicago Review of Books Best Book of the Year * A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year * A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist

"With narrative elan, Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country--and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time." --Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile

"Riveting...Egan is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.

The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he'd become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows - their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman - Madge Oberholtzer - who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.

Timothy Egan works for The New York Times as a national enterprise correspondent. He was part of a team of reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for the paper's series on racial attitudes in modern America. He is the author of four books, the most recent of which, The Worst Hard Time: The Hidden Story of People Who Experienced the Great American Dust Bowl (2006), won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2006. Amy Pastan, a former editor and researcher at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is now an independent editor and scholar. W. has written the preface. The Library of Congress's director of publishing, Ralph Eubanks.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780735225268
ISBN 10	0735225265
Title	A Fever in the Heartland
Author	Timothy Egan
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Prentice Hall Press
Year published	2023-04-04
Number of pages	432
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.