The Man Without A Country was a short story published anonymously by Edward Everett Hale, in the Atlantic Monthly in 1863. Although the events of the novel were set in the early 1800's, the story was an allegory and implicitly referred to the upheaval of the American Civil War (especially in Ohio, with the expatriation of Clement Vallandigham). Hale, a fiercely patriotic man, intended to criticize those who had renounce the United States, and to thus foster patriotism for the Northern cause. This film was produced by Edwin Thanhouser in 1917 and was the first full-lenght adaptation of the Hale Story.