Timothy Egan

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Ruth Fremson

A close-up of Timothy Egan.

Timothy Egan

If you've ever read a book by Timothy Egan, you know he combines thorough research with clear passionate storytelling. His latest, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, is just out from Viking. Egan concentrates on Midwestern KKK leader D.C. Stephenson of Indiana. The "woman" of the subtitle is Madge Oberholtzer — kidnapped and raped by Stephenson, she was able to report him to police before succumbing to her injuries. Egan's appearance is a Wisconsin Book Festival event.

media release: A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (Viking; On-sale: April 4, 2023) chronicles the gripping story of the Klan’s rise to power ot in the old Confederacy, but the West and the Heartland of America in an age characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity, the Roaring Twenties—the Jazz Age. Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning writer Timothy Egan narrates a little-known story of the Klan and its charismatic, murderous leader, DC Stephenson; it was a group that hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise.

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: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of nine other books, most recently the highly acclaimed A Pilgrimage to Eternity and The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. His account of photographer Edward Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, won the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction.

"Timothy Egan's history of the Ku Klux Klan's rise and fall is absolutely gripping. It is also terrifyingly relevant." —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Sixth Extinction

“Egan has done it again, mastering another complicated American story with authority and surprising detail. The Klan here are not the nightriders of the late 19th century, but a retooled special interest group and unusually potent political power. The influence they wielded over states and policy should put a chill in every American. Bravo.” —Ken Burns

"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