The Foolish Virgin

Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by George Bellows, Childe Hassam and William Morris Hunt. A New York stenographer of romantic notions marries a handsome stranger against every warning and finds out who he is afterwards, in a cabin in the Carolina mountains. Dixon was a lawyer and Baptist minister whose novel The Clansman glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Griffith's The Birth of a Nation — a fact the reader should have in hand. This 1915 book is a melodrama of marriage and drugs, and the same certainties are underneath it. Fifty-eight plates by painters including John Sloan and George Bellows carry the noise of New York streets, music halls and gambling dens, the city the bride leaves behind.