MacKinlay Kantor  

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MacKinlay Kantor (4 February 1904 - 11 October 1977) was an American novelist and screenwriter who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his 1955 novel Andersonville about the infamous Confederate prisoner of war camp in the American Civil War. Kantor was noted for his sparing use of punctuation and was a strong political conservative.

Kantor published his first poem at the age of 17, and at 18 he won a state story writing contest. His first novel, Diversey, was about Chicago gangsters and was written in 1928, when the subject matter was contemporary. In the 1930s, Kantor first wrote about the American Civil War with his novel Long Remember. Kantor had spoken with Civil War veterans when he was young, and he was an avid collector of first-hand narratives. Long Remember is one of the first realistic novels about the Civil War.

Kantor's long narrative poem in blank verse, Glory for Me, published as a novella in 1945, provided the basis of the Academy Award winning film The Best Years of Our Lives.

He wrote over 30 novels in his lifetime, and he returned to the theme of the Civil War frequently, including Gettysburg, If the South Had Won the Civil War and Lee and Grant at Appomattox. His last novel was 1975's Valley Forge. Kantor also wrote the screenplay for the noted film noir Gun Crazy (aka Deadly Is the Female) (1950) and appeared in the 1958 film Wind Across the Everglades as an actor.