"Andersonville" by MacKinlay Kantor

[Linda Anderson]

The following article is from this week's New York Times Book Review.

"A Civil War Classic Endures"

"The cover of the Book Review on Oct. 30, 1955, was split in two. On one side, the historian Henry Steele Commager reviewed MacKinlay Kantor’s “Andersonville,” calling it “the greatest of our Civil War novels.” On the other side, Kantor himself wrote an essay about the more than two decades he spent researching and writing his densely peopled 750-page epic about the notoriously inhumane Confederate prisoner of war camp in Georgia. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956, was recently republished in a new edition.

"In his essay, Kantor wrote about the time he spent in Andersonville communing with the novel’s spirits: 'Regulations declare that a United States Military Cemetery may not be visited at night; yet on occasion I had sinned so, and had not felt myself a sinner; I’d felt that I belonged there.'

"Kantor’s grandson Tom Shroder has just published “The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived,” a biography of this prolific author."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/books/...dures.html