Author Description

<p><b>"A haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today . . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance." </b><b>—Walter Isaacson, <i>The New York Times Book Review</i></b><br><b><br>A 2020 NPR staff pick | One of <i>The New York Times</i>' thirteen books to watch for in August | One of <i>The Washington Post</i>'s ten books to read in August | A <i>Literary Hub </i>best book of the summer| One of <i>Kirkus Reviews'</i> sixteen best books to read in August</b><br><b><br>The life and times of a militant white supremacist, written by one of his offspring, National Book Award–winner Edward Ball</b><br><br><i>Life of a Klansman</i> tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his family’s anti-black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail.<br><br>Sifting through family lore about “our Klansman” as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A white French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages—all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-white view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by “our Klansman” and his comrades, and shares their stories.<br><br>For whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that fifty percent of whites in the United Sta