(Blindfolded and hearing this story read, I should guess i...)
Blindfolded and hearing this story read, I should guess it to be an early Hemingway. It has that same sense of the tropics that he reveals occasionally, that same cryptic, illusory vein, that sense of seizing bits here, bits there, and fitting them, almost unconsciously, into a pattern as the story progresses. There is none of the directness, the realism of most of Kantor's work. This is almost too oblique, and yet somehow it suits the brief tragedy of the scene in Havana. Longer than Bugle Ann or Valedictory, but at that not a full length book. It is a moving story, vividly told, ""of a Cuban patriot who sacrificed all for his cause.
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A story about love and death in Chicago during the age ...)
A story about love and death in Chicago during the age of prohibition, this novel was originally published in 1928 and out of print for nearly 50 years. Set in a boarding house on the north side of Chicago, the novel follows Marry Javlyn, a newspaperman who has just arrived from Iowa; Jo Ruska, a switchboard operator; and Abe Wise, a gangster on the lam. Marry and Jo fall in love, but when Marry is lured away by a glamorous newspaper culture critic, he descends into a Gomorrah of speakeasies, patronage jobs, and dingy art studios. Despite family secrets revealed, betrayed loyalties, and a violent climax, Marry still has a chance in the end for redemption. With an original, rollicking plot and memorable characters, the story stands as an authentic and invaluable artifact of an era long distorted beyond recognition by sensationalism and stereotype.
(MacKinlay Kantor's Long Remember is the first realistic n...)
MacKinlay Kantor's Long Remember is the first realistic novel about the Civil War. Originally published in the 1930s, and out of print since the 50s, this book received rave reviews from the New York Times Book Review and was a main selection of the Literary Guild. It is the account of the Battle of Gettysburg, as viewed by a pacifist who comes to accept the nasty necessity of combat, and lives an intense and skewed romance along the way.
The Voice of Bugle Ann (The Derrydale Press Foxhunters' Library)
(A tale of murder and the finest hunting dog ever bred in ...)
A tale of murder and the finest hunting dog ever bred in rural Missouri. We include The Voice of Bugle Ann in The Derrydale Press Foxhunters' Library as a testament to one of the finest pieces of foxhunting fiction ever written.
(A tribute and history of the now-extinct Passenger Pigeon...)
A tribute and history of the now-extinct Passenger Pigeons ". the text is from Audubon, the dream from Emerson. As the reader turns the pages of this book, he will be overwhelmed by a sound which has not existed within our generation: the aerial pulse of pigeon wings, the journey roar of wild doves which once filled American Skies."
(MACKINLAY KANTORPulitzer Prize-winning author of Anderson...)
MACKINLAY KANTORPulitzer Prize-winning author of Andersonville
A Novel of Escape During the Civil War
BASIS FOR THE FILMTHE MAN FROM DAKOTA
This is the story of three strange companions who attain what seldom has been won by any escaping prisoners.
Two Yankee soldiers escape from Belle Island, the Confederate Prison, in 1864. As they make their way northward to the Union lines on the Rapidan they are joined by a woman who is fleeing from Richmond. The hazards of their painful flight are tremendous as they travel by night on roads as ominous as the incredible future awaiting them.
Starvation and feasting, the swift beat of love, the primitive encounter, the hot cry of triumph—these elements are combined in this bold and valiant tale of sacrifice and high devotion.
Arouse and Beware, first published in 1936, was widely praised by the critics and became a best seller. Now with the success of MacKinlay Kantor's great novel, Andersonville, and the enormous interest in the Civil War period, it is being re-issued again to be enjoyed by a whole new generation of readers.<
MacKinlay Kantor was an American novelist. He served as a reporter for Webster City Daily News and as a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. During World War II he was a war correspondent with the British Royal Air Force and served as a gunner in the United States Army's Eighth Air Force.
Background
MacKinlay Kantor was born Benjamin McKinlay Kantor, on February 4, 1904 in Webster City, Iowa, United States. He was the son of John Marvin Kantor, a confidence man who deserted the family, and Effie Rachel MacKinlay, a writer and newspaper editor. Kantor and his sister were raised by their mother, who edited the Webster City Freeman-Tribune. At the age of ten, he became an avid student of the Civil War after a salesman left sample pages from a Civil War encyclopedia at his home. Kantor, the great-grandson of a Union Army officer, grew up in a family that had vivid memories of the war. Eleven of his ancestors and relatives had fought for the N. A favorite aunt, who lived in Galena, Illinois, had known Ulysses S. Grant and regaled him with stories. Kantor marched with the Grand Army of the Republic in Memorial Day parades, became an accomplished fifer, and was a member of the Association of Civil War Musicians.
Education
Kantor attended high schools in Chicago and Des Moines before returning to Webster City in 1921. He graduated from Webster City High School in 1923.
Career
Kantor started his career as a reporter for the newspaper Webster City Daily News. Encouraged by his mother, he began writing poetry and short stories. At the age of eighteen, he won a statewide short story contest sponsored by the Des Moines Register. "Suddenly, I knew that I could write, and some people knew it too, " Kantor said. Around 1923 Kantor was seriously injured in an automobile accident. His left thigh was shattered. The tall, slender Kantor walked with a limp for the rest of his life. During his long recovery from the accident, Kantor decided to pursue a literary career.
He moved to Chicago in 1925 and attempted without success to get a reporting job on a major daily newspaper. In the process, he made valuable contacts and became a frequent contributor to the Chicago Tribune's "Line O Type" column and the feature supplements of other newspapers. He subsidized his writing career by working as a clerk in the Cook County treasurer's office, for the Mandel Brothers department store, and as the assistant advertising manager for the American Flyer Company, a manufacturer of toy trains.
Kantor's first novel, Diversey (1928), was among the earliest fictional treatments of the Chicago organized-crime syndicate. Senator Coleman Blease of South Carolina denounced the novel as "the dirtiest thing I have ever read. " But Fanny Butcher, the Chicago Tribune's literary critic, wrote that Kantor had shown "a real gift for storytelling, and he makes a thriller out of his tale. " Kantor, who was still struggling to support his family on his writing income, returned to Iowa and worked briefly as a reporter for the Cedar Rapids Republican (1927) and as a columnist for the Des Moines Tribune (1930 - 1931).
A second Chicago novel, El Goes South (1930), attracted less attention than his first book. His third novel, The Jaybird (1932), focuses on a Civil War veteran and fife player who has become the town drunk. The Civil War was a recurring theme in Kantor's fiction, and he wrote about it with power and narrative force. In April 1932, he and his family moved to Westfield, New Jersey, where he started writing his most ambitious work. In preparation for his novel about the battle of Gettysburg, Kantor had spent years working with primary source materials and attending encampments of the United Confederate Veterans; studied journals, letters, and diaries written by soldiers on both sides of the conflict; and made extensive use of the archives of the United States and Confederate States war departments. Kantor also gained firsthand knowledge of the battlefield and town in visits to Gettysburg.
Long Remember (1934) is a superb fictional account of the Battle of Gettysburg, written from the perspective of the soldiers and residents of the town. Allen Tate, who reviewed Kantor's novel for the Nation, wrote: "There is no book ever written which creates, so well as this, the look and smell of battle. As a spectacle of war, this book has no equal. " Long Remember, which was a selection of the Literary Guild, was a commercial success. National magazines, which had previously rejected his short stories, competed for his byline in the wake of Long Remember. The Voice of Bugle Ann (1935), Kantor's most enduringly popular novel, set in the wooded hills of Missouri, is about a man who risks hanging to avenge his foxhound. The novel was adapted into a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture in 1936.
Kantor's second Civil War novel, Arouse and Beware (1936), is about two Union soldiers escaping from a Confederate prison camp. The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1937) is a novel about the relationship between a Yankee veteran and the daughter of a former Southern officer. From 1936 until 1939, Kantor had an affair with Margaret Leech Pulitzer, a novelist and historian who influenced his development as a writer. Kantor aided Leech in her research for Reveille in Washington (1941), a history of the nation's capital during the Civil War. Kantor reviewed Leech's book favorably for the New York Times. "Peggy's greatest influence was on his prose, which became leaner, cleaner, during those years, " Tim Kantor wrote of his father's relationship with Leech. Kantor made no reference to his affair with Leech in I Love You, Irene (1972), a memoir of his marriage.
The Kantors built a home in Sarasota, Florida, in 1936 and traveled widely. During World War II, Kantor served as a war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post and flew with the British Royal Air Force. He attended gunnery school in England and flew eleven combat missions with the 305th Bomb Group of the United States Army's Eighth Air Force. He became a close friend and confidant of General Curtis LeMay, and was the coauthor of LeMay's autobiography, Mission With LeMay (1965). Kantor flew six more missions during the Korean conflict. He said that his wartime experience brought a new dimension to his writings.
Kantor's 1945 novel, Glory for Me, written in verse, focused on the resettlement of three World War II veterans in a small midwestern town. His story was rewritten into a screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and adapted into the 1946 motion picture The Best Years of Our Lives, which received nine Academy Awards. An autobiography of his formative years, But Look, the Morn (1947), was written with warmth and affection and dedicated to the residents of his Iowa hometown. Kantor, who was a tireless researcher, spent nearly two years patrolling New York City's Twenty-third Precinct with police officers in gathering background for Signal Thirty-two (1950), a novel about New York policemen. But the Civil War remained Kantor's passion. He published Lee and Grant at Appomattox (1950) and Gettysburg (1952) for Random House's Landmark Books, a popular juvenile series. His 1955 Civil War novel, Andersonville, was an authoritative history of the notorious Confederate prison camp where 50, 000 Union soldiers were held. "Andersonville reduced them to a single pattern: they were stamped out of that pattern by the enormous heavy die of confinement, like a row of toy tin wretches holding hands, " wrote Kantor, who had spent more than a quarter century gathering his research for the novel.
Kantor later wrote Silent Grow the Guns and Other Tales of the American Civil War (1958) and If the South Had Won the Civil War (1961). Spirit Lake (1961), an epic historical novel about an 1857 Indian massacre of Iowa settlers, received mixed reviews and was a commercial disappointment. Although the book was long on historical detail, it was overwritten and disjointed. Kantor blamed the literary establishment, not the decline of his writing skills, for the disappointing reception of his later books.
Beauty Beast (1968), a novel about a nineteenth-century slave owned by a sexually frustrated Southern woman, was an embarrassment. Kantor struck back at his critics in Missouri Bittersweet (1969), writing with bitterness and scorn in his second book of memoirs. His final historical novel, Valley Forge (1975), was well researched but plodding and contrived. Though the reviews were negative, Kantor still had a following. The novel, written for the United States Bicentennial, went into five printings and was an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Kantor died of congestive heart failure in Sarasota, Florida. Kantor had few peers at bringing the American past vividly to life. He wrote with sentiment about the small town values of the heartland. More than any American novelist since Stephen Crane, Kantor wrote with realism and clarity about the Civil War.