Ignatius Donnelly, "the Sage of Nininger," was a politician of mercurial temperament and shifting party allegiances who embraced nearly every radical reform movement of the post-Civil War period. Out of office as much as in, he at one time or another made a career as lawyer, farmer, lecturer, editor, and man of letters. As a writer, he is most often remembered for Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), a pseudoscientific work still read by cultists; The Great Cryptogram (1888), one of the more sensational attempts to prove Francis Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare's plays; and Caesar's Column (1890), a futuristic anti-utopian novel expressing the hopes and fears of the American reform movement. In Caesar's Column, and in his other fiction as well, Donnelly attacks the evils of the American social and economic system. His novels are marred by didacticism, sentimentality, and fantastic plots, yet he at times projects a powerful and grotesque vision of a world gone mad.
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