The Roaring Twenties has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

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—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 marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.

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, 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