SOURCE: Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. “‘One of the Meanest Books’: Thomas Dixon, Jr. and The Leopard's Spots.” North Carolina Literary Review 2, no. 1 (spring 1994): 87-101.

In the following essay, Gilmore examines Dixon's life as illuminated by his novels and his autobiography Southern Horizons, and concludes that Dixon's “only success was the transformation of personal obsessions into popular wisdom.”

“I tried to write this book with the utmost restraint,” Thomas Dixon, Jr. recalls in a historical note that accompanies his first fictional work, The Leopard's Spots,¹ a vicious 1902 tale of white manhood lost and regained in post-Civil War North Carolina. While Dixon acknowledges that readers might find the narrative horrifying, he assures them that rendering reality would have been even worse. In fact, he worked hard to “tone down the facts to make them credible in fiction” (vi). The truth, he cautions, would be more than his readers could bear. Indeed...