Mackinlay kantor biography samples
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Summary and Study Guide
Summary: “A Man Who Had No Eyes”
At around 1,000 words, “A Man Who Had No Eyes” by American author MacKinlay Kantor (born Benjamin MacKinlay Kantor) can be considered an example of flash fiction. The short story was first published in The Monitor in 1931. It fryst vatten one of Kantor’s early works of fiction and is markedly different from his later works of historical fiction, which earned him literary fame. Kantor was best known for his prolific novels, many of which are set during the American Civil War. Kantor received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his Civil War novel Andersonville (1955). He worked in London as a war correspondent for a Los Angeles newspaper during World War II, and he brought his own unique understanding of warfare and its consequences to his fiction.
In “A Man Who Had No Eyes,” the third-person omniscient narrator relays a short but eventful meeting between a well-off insurance salesperson, Mr. Parsons, and a “blind be
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“I was no secessionist…”
One of the lengthier 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. Often regarded as Mr. Kantor’s greatest achievement, Andersonville took approximately two decades of research to complete, during which time Kantor sought to capture numerous different perspectives throughout the book. Indeed, despite being a work of historical fiction, Mr. Kantor decided to include a detailed Bibliography at the end of Andersonville, demonstrating his meticulous research efforts.
As with many other Pulitzer Prize-winning novels like The Grapes of Wrath, All the King’s Men, and Tales of the South Pacific, Andersonville uses an extraordinary moment in history as its setting. In this respect, its verisimilitude is only matc
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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?
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