Life of a Klansman

“Taking the reader along with him on a journey of discovery as he teases out facts, [Edward Ball] engages in speculation and shares his emotions about the sad saga of Constant Lecorgne, an unsuccessful carpenter and embittered racist who was a great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side. The result is 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 . . . Lecorgne was a minor player . . . but for that reason his tale is valuable, both for understanding his times and for understanding our own; he allows us a glimpse of who becomes one of the mass of followers of racist movements, and why . . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance."—Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review

“Ball’s direct but nimble prose cuts the contours of Constant Lecorgne’s life and grapples simultaneously with the coherent outline and structure that whiteness imposes . . . Though he claims Life of a Klansman is an investigation of his matrilineal ancestor, Ball has engineered another kind of coup: a public reckoning with white supremacy . . . Ball’s book is about the postbellum US and the US in 2020; it’s looking both directions at once.”—Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe

"Provocative and painful . . . What emerges is a harrowing reckoning with one family's past, as well as a nation's past in miniature."—Susan Larson, The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate

“Captivating . . . An intimate origin story of the white-supremacist movement . . . [Edward Ball] reconstructs his ancestor’s world and moral insight in a work of novelistic expansiveness . . . Ball refuses to ‘disown’ the past, believing it crucial for white Americans to acknowledge that ‘marauders like Constant are our people, and they fight for us.’ Accordingly, he approaches his ancestor’s story with shame, but also sympathy and imagination.”—Julian Lucas, Harper's

"In writing a microhistory about [his great-great-grandfather], [Ball] builds a psychological portrait of white supremacy, which then radiates outward and across time, to explain the motives and historical background behind racist violence . . . Ball offers a particularly piercing psychoanalytic reading of the present, even though his subject is the past."—Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic

"Ball tells his story with curiosity, disgust, and a sweeping lamp of novelistic imagination, making his tale all the chillier for being so intimate, so intensely realized . . . This is an important work of America’s collective history—one whose ghosts are most undead."—John Freeman, Literary Hub

"Spanning most of the 19th century, Life of a Klansman is a nuanced case study of one cog within a machine of terrorism and oppression . . . [a] nuanced biography . . . In flexing his imagination, Ball creates a dynamic space for challenging reconciliation, breaking from the narrative periodically to reflect with empathy for family members acting in ways he abhors, yet never absolving them."—Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"There is no other writer of nonfiction about race writing today who has taken us deeper into our greatest national and familial dilemma than Edward Ball. Life of a Klansman is a deeply personal history, a brave work, and a lodestar for how we have arrived at yet another reckoning about white supremacy. Ball demonstrates here, for all who wish to try, just how to face, narrate, and understand our past even when we find ancestors and stories we might wish away. In his work, he allows for no looking away, and he does so in lyrical prose."—David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

"In this compelling narrative of the life of a klansman, Edward Ball reckons with the history of whiteness that has shaped the U.S. and which is his personal inheritance. Ball confronts the violence and hatred at the foundation of white authority and privilege by recounting his great-great-grandfather’s worldview and acts of brutality. It is easy to recoil from the ugliness documented in these pages; much more difficult is the task of acknowledging that murder and terror are the bedrock of the nation. Life of A Klansman is a must-read, now more than ever."—Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

“If you are a white American, Edward Ball calculates, the odds that you have a Klansman in your family tree are one in two. In this singular work of imaginative reconstruction, Ball brings his own family's Klansman out of the closet and into the light. With a detective’s tenacity, Life of a Klansman personalizes the terror of white supremacy as it builds toward a crescendo that sears the soul.”—Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan

"Edward Ball’s fascinating Life of A Klansman escapes genres. His art combines imagination and history to tell the story of the sometimes brutal, often mundane, life of his ancestor, a New Orleans carpenter who became 'our klansman.' Delicately balancing empathy and disgust, he examines the chokehold whiteness and white supremacy have fastened on public memory."—Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University and author of The Republic for Which It Stands

"[A] resonant tale . . . [and] a self-searching meditation . . . An illuminating contribution to the literature of race and racism in America."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A violent legacy stirs a deep meditation on the nature of racism in this anguished study of Civil War–era New Orleans . . . [Edward Ball] vividly reconstructs the mindset that propelled [his great-great-grandfather]—a resentful, working-class striver nostalgic for his family’s formerly privileged position atop New Orleans’ complex racial hierarchy—into racist activism . . . The result is a clear-eyed work of historical reclamation and an intimate, self-lacerating take on memory and collective responsibility."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The author of the National Book Award–winning Slaves in the Family returns with a powerful, horrifying history of a family and a nation . . . Ball assembles a compelling, nuanced story . . . [Life of a Klansman] is sober, dominated by a deep sense of shame and outrage, and intentionally disquieting. It won't be a comfortable reading experience, and it's not meant to be, but it’s a necessary one.”—Margaret Quamme, Booklist (starred review)