The Minnesota politician and writer Ignatius Donnelly is primarily remembered because of three strange books that earned him the nickname “the Prince of Cranks.” In Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), an improbable bestseller, Donnelly assembled a vast dossier of circumstantial evidence from archaeology, the natural sciences, and philology to argue that the mythical sunken island actually existed—and, moreover, that every human civilization could be traced back to it. A year later, he published Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, in which he speculated that the uppermost layer of the earth’s crust was formed not by glacial action, as scientific consensus held, but by a comet that passed close to our planet, spewing gravel over it; he further asserted that memories of this near-collision were recorded in the stories of Phaeton, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Ragnarok, among other myths, and that the darkness caused by clouds of dust led to the emergence of sun worship in many societies. In The Great Cryptogram (1888), Donnelly purported to have discovered a secret code in the First Folio that, when deciphered, proved that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays. The failure of the book, which Donnelly promoted enthusiastically, made him a laughingstock on both sides of the Atlantic.
If not for these unorthodox writings, Donnelly would probably be best known for his energetic efforts on behalf of late-19th-century agrarian and labor movements. Although he began his political career as a Republican, he grew critical of the party’s strengthening ties to business, as he was opposed to exploitative interest rates and the railroad companies’ monopoly over grain supply chains. Donnelly expressed his fears about inequality and uncompetitive economic practices in his first novel, Caesar’s Column (1889), a dystopian story set in New York City in 1988 that combined science fiction (giant air balloons that allow for speedy transatlantic travel, tablet-like devices on which users can access newspapers from all over the world) with the political prophesizing of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Whereas Looking Backward predicted a technocratic resolution to the conflict between capital and labor, Caesar’s Column envisioned a country that tore itself apart through greed, fear, and resentment.