At certain points, it veers far too heavily into fond, sympathetic portrayals of white slave-owning southerners, and in other cases it fails to capture the full nuance of Confederate treatment of Union POWs. However, straddling the fence between fiction and history serves as a double-edged sword for Andersonville. In this respect, its verisimilitude is only matched by its sheer breadth. Kantor decided to include a detailed Bibliography at the end of Andersonville, which demonstrates his thorough research efforts.Īs with other Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, like The Grapes of Wrath, All the King’s Men, or Tales of the South Pacific, Andersonville explores an extraordinary historical epoch through the fictive lens of literature. Indeed, despite being a work of historical fiction, Mr. Kantor’s greatest achievement, Andersonville took approximately two decades of research to complete, during which Kantor sought to capture numerous different perspectives throughout the book. One of the longest Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, MacKinlay Kantor’s nearly 800-page tome Andersonville is a dense modernist examination of the monstrously inhumane Confederate prisoner of war camp of the same name which once housed some 45,000 Union prisoners during the American Civil War.
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