Birthday Book of the Day: Andersonville, the story of the Confederate prison, 1st ed.

MacKinlay Kantor, Andersonville (World, 1st ed. 1955). LOC 55-8257. Kantor’s best-selling novel of the notorious Civil War prison camp where thousands of Union prisoners died in fourteen months. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket in mylar, very good condition. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Rare in this condition.  HBB price: $59.95.

An Iowan, Kantor (1904-1977) got his start writing for the pulp fiction magazines of the 1920s and ‘30s. He and his family moved to New Jersey in 1934, to be closer to the publishing hub of New York, and settled in a new planned community called Free Acres. The vision of an Irish enthusiast of the reformer Henry George’s Single Tax theories, its other early residents included the actor James Cagney and the writer Thorne Smith (of the Topper series).

A 1934 article in Collier's was Kantor’s break into the quality glossy magazines, and he embarked on a prolific career in books. His career output ran to 32 novels, six collections of stories, four children’s books, six nonfiction works, and contributions to eleven film productions.

During World War II he was a European war correspondent, and was there when Allied troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. Trying to make sense of, and describe, that experience became one of the underpinnings of his novel, Andersonville, a decade later.

After the war, one of Kantor’s books became the basis for the Oscar-winning film, The Best Years of Our Lives. A Civil War enthusiast from youth, Kantor took an unusual approach to writing of the conflict in Andersonville. Rather than focus on the great battles, he recreated the infamous Confederate prison camp where some twelve thousand Union soldiers died out of some 45,000 shipped there during the Civil War.

The 26.5 acre site in the Georgia woods was a hastily-constructed stockade, with little shelter or amenities. Food was scarce, and feeding enemy prisoners was at the the bottom of Confederate priorities. Starvation and disease were rampant. Kantor interwove the stories, and points of view of a large cast of characters, some real and some invented. His writing style was short on punctuation and quotation marks; considered offbeat in its time, it inspired the writer Cormac McCarthy, one of the most innovative American authors of the generations after Kantor.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956. Andersonville was the site of a national military cemetery from during the war on; about 150 burials a year are performed there today. The Andersonville National Historic site contains the cemetery, the prison, and the National Prisoner of War Museum.

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