A political career in Minnesota
Donnelly was born in Philadelphia in 1831, trained in law and moved to Minnesota in 1857. He became lieutenant governor and then served three terms in the United States House of Representatives. In later campaigns he championed farmers and workers and became a prominent figure in the populist movement.
Writing gave him another audience. Atlantis: The Antediluvian World appeared in 1882 and brought international attention to a theory he assembled from mythology, accounts of antiquities and comparisons between cultures. His later interests included the claim that Francis Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays. These speculative projects accompanied a public career concerned with the distribution of political and economic power.
A lost continent and a world in catastrophe
Atlantis begins with Plato’s account and expands it into a proposed common origin for ancient civilisations. Ragnarok, published the following year, turns to fire, darkness and destruction in myth as evidence for a cometary catastrophe. Donnelly reads deposits of gravel and accounts of disaster as traces of one event. Modern historians treat these books as speculative prehistory, and his proposed connections remain unestablished. Both copies held here are labelled eleventh editions. The Atlantis copy retains an 1882 copyright notice, while its imprint gives no printing date.
