Ignatius Donnelly

Ignatius Donnelly was an American politician and writer. Born in Philadelphia, he moved to Minnesota, served as its lieutenant governor and as a US congressman from 1863 to 1869, and later helped found the Populist Party.

His Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) was his most successful book. He argued that Plato's Atlantis was a real island in the Atlantic, the original home of civilization, whose colonists founded the cultures of Egypt, the Americas and elsewhere, and whose sinking survived as the world's flood myths. His Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883) blamed ancient catastrophes on a comet. He also championed the theory that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, which he tried to prove with ciphers.

Geologists and archaeologists rejected his claims; ocean-floor mapping found no sunken continent. But the book was hugely influential. Since 1882, Atlantis has served as the lost civilization behind countless theories, and later writers on comet catastrophes and lost ages follow his outline.