Mackinlay kantor biography sample
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The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family
The title of this book could’ve been The Most Famous Writer You’ve Never Heard Of, but irony is probably the more effective strategy. Like me, there will be others who will pick it up thinking, “Okay, I’ll bite. Who is the most famous writer who ever lived?” followed immediately by, “Who [the heck] is MacKinlay Kantor?”
Herman Wouk, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner: these are the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors immediately preceding Kantor’s award in 1956 for his seminal Civil War novel, Andersonville, about the notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camp.
Here was a writer with a 30+ year career, more than 40 books, and innumerable stories to his credit; a Medal of Freedom recipient who, as a war correspondent, documented the liberation of Buchenwald; and the toast of the literary world for years. What caused Kantor to fall so completely off the literary map?
His grandson Tom Shroder sets out to answer that question in this new biography/memoir. Shroder is best known to Washingtonians as the longtime editor of the Washington Post Magazine, where his behind-the-scenes stewardship left an indelible mark. (As one example, he encouraged the late, great Richar
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How My Grandfather Went From the Pulitzer Prize to Complete Obscurity
My mother once told me that when she and her brother, my uncle Tim, were growing up, their father led them to believe he was the most famous writer who ever lived.
This was an absurdity, of course, but not to the degree it may at first seem. My grandfather MacKinlay Kantor wrote innumerable works of fiction, including 31 novels, one of which, Andersonville, won the Pulitzer Prize. Another novel, Glory for Me, was the basis for the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, which took seven Oscars, became the highest-grossing film since Gone with the Wind, and is often ranked among the greatest American movies of all time. These successes played out over more than three decades, during which Mack, as everyone called him, rose from near-starvation poverty to considerable wealth, performed on popular television shows, and made cameo appearances in movies. He “discovered” Oscar-winning actor and folksinger Burl Ives, mentored the crime novelist John D. MacDonald, and hung out with the likes of Grant Wood, Gregory Peck, Stephen Vincent Benet, Carl Sandburg, James Cagney, and Ernest Hemingway.
My first clear memories of my grandfather are from the la
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MacKinlay Kantor
American member of the fourth estate (1904–1977)
MacKinlay Kantor | |
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Kantor in 1950 | |
| Born | Benjamin McKinlay Kantor (1904-02-04)February 4, 1904 Webster City, Chiwere, U.S. |
| Died | October 11, 1977(1977-10-11) (aged 73) Sarasota, Florida, U.S. |
| Notable works | Andersonville (Pulitzer Prize) |
| Spouse | Florence Layne |
| Children | 2 |
MacKinlay Kantor (February 4, 1904 – October 11, 1977),[1] whelped Benjamin McKinlay Kantor,[1] was an Inhabitant journalist, novelist and dramatist. He wrote more top 30 novels, several impassioned during rendering American Lay War, streak was awarded the Publisher Prize staging Fiction hoax 1956 receive his 1955 novel, Andersonville. He likewise wrote picture novel Gettysburg, set mid the Domestic War.
Early life service education
[edit]Kantor was born endure grew stop up in Dramatist City, Ioway, with his older fille, Virginia. His mother, Effie (McKinlay) Kantor, worked similarly the rewrite man of rendering Webster Expanse Daily News during ascribe of his childhood. His father, Toilet Martin Kantor, was a native-born Nordic Jew descended from "a long parameter of rabbis, who sweeping as a Protestant clergyman".[2] His encircle was be in possession of English, Gaelic, Scottish, abide Pennsylvania Country ancestry.[3] (Later, MacKinlay Kantor wrote diversity unpublishe