Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

Acclaimed as the greatest novel ever written about the War Between the States, this searing Pulitzer Prize-winning book captures all the glory and shame of America's most tragic conflict in the vivid, crowded world of Andersonville, and the people who lived outside its barricades. Based on the author's extensive research and nearly 25 years in the making, MacKinlay Kantor's best-selling masterwork tells the heartbreaking story of the notorious Georgia prison where 50,000 Northern soldiers suffered - and 14,000 died - and of the people whose lives were changed by the grim camp where the best and the worst of the Civil War came together. Here is the savagery of the camp commandant, the deep compassion of a nearby planter and his gentle daughter, the merging of valor and viciousness within the stockade itself, and the day-to-day fight for survival among the cowards, cutthroats, innocents, and idealists thrown together by the brutal struggle between North and South. A moving portrait of the bravery of people faced with hopeless tragedy, this is the inspiring American classic of an unforgettable period in American history.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Civil War, War, Classics, American Civil War, Historical

766 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Benjamin McKinlay Kantor, was an American journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He wrote more than 30 novels, several set during the American Civil War, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his 1955 novel Andersonville

Kantor was born in Webster City, Iowa, in 1904. His mother, a journalist, encouraged Kantor to develop his writing style. Kantor started writing seriously as a teen-ager when he worked as a reporter with his mother at the local newspaper in Webster City.

Kantor's first novel was published when he was 24.

During World War II, Kantor reported from London as a war correspondent for a Los Angeles newspaper. After flying on several bombing missions, he asked for and received training to operate the bomber's turret machine guns (this was illegal, as he was not in service).
Nevertheless he was decorated with the Medal of Freedom by Gen. Carl Spaatz, then the U.S. Army Air Corp commander. He also saw combat during the Korean War as a correspondent.

In addition to journalism and novels, Kantor wrote the screenplay for Gun Crazy (aka Deadly Is the Female) (1950), a noted film noir. It was based on his short story by the same name, published February 3, 1940 in a "slick" magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. In 1992, it was revealed that he had allowed his name to be used on a screenplay written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, who had been blacklisted as a result of his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) hearings. Kantor passed his payment on to Trumbo to help him survive.

Several of his novels were adapted for films. He established his own publishing house, and published several of his works in the 1930s and 1940s.

Kantor died of a heart attack in 1977, at the age of 73, at his home in Sarasota, Florida.

Reviews

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that I read as a young teenager. It changed my life. I was living a fairly middle class suburban life and couldn't believe that people could be treated the way people in this book were treated. It was not so much an anti-war book for me as an anti-humanity book. People could not do the things that were described here to other people. Not possible. It would be impossible for humans to suffer like that.

I had had a limited experience of the South. My family had driven from Michigan to the Gulf Coast in Florida for warm Easter vacations. This was before the Interstates were completed so we drove some stretches through the South on the blue highways. We saw glimpses of poverty and segregation. But Andersonville was on a highway like none I had ever experienced or imagined.

This book introduced me to experiences that I could barely fathom. It showed me what a safe little world I inhabited and thought was normal. I had had duck 'n' cover in the hallways of my elementary school, had heard a little about the holocaust and Hiroshima. But Andersonville started to actually put some real tarnish on the shiny world that I thought I inhabited.

Listening to the Audible version many years later.
August 18, 2017

The book begins with ira wondering his land early of a morning. Ira is familiar with the land and with the flora in the fauna. Listening to him think about the plants and animals is quite enjoyable. He is probably 50 and has several slaves that help him farm the land. He had three sons but two are already dead in the water and one still serves. As he enjoys his solitude in the country A small party appears, soldiers and surveyors. They are searching out a site to be a prison for union soldiers. As they ride off ira hope they will not choose his land.

I am amazed to find myself at the beginning of chapter 7 and still amidst the details prior to the development of Andersonville.

I continue to progress through the Audible book up to chapter 24 now. Descriptions of the prison camp with a population of over 10,000 are somewhat horrifying although The book is actually still dominated by descriptions of individuals, often their lives prior to the Civil War and their imprisonment.

There are now 22,000 prisoners in Andersonville. The commandant of the prison is of German dissent and still speaks German frequently. This is an interesting addition to the Audible format. He is presented with a strange combination of characteristics: both cruelty but also a desire to make the prison a better facility. The outer wall of the stockade is made with 22 foot tree trunks buried five or 6 feet into the ground and rising approximately 15 feet into the air. At one point the size of the stockade was increased creating about 760 feet of logs that would be removed and could be reused. The commandant had many plans for this lumber but he got up one morning and found that the prisoners had removed the logs themselves by hand and made many improvements in their living conditions with the wood.

There are now 33,000 prisoners in Andersonville. Apparently many of them are Catholic as evidenced by the stories of the Catholic priest who serves the community. It sometimes takes a strong stomach to read the descriptions of the smells of Andersonville. Human waste and rotting bodies both dead and alive. The prison camp could be smelled 2 miles away.

Andersonville: "a stench in the nostrils of history." The neighbors of the camp whom we met earlier in the book did on occasion try to improve the circumstances of the prisoners. They brought food that was surplus from their farms. This food was used for those who worked at the camp but not allowed to be distributed to the prisoners. After several reports about the extraordinarily poor conditions were ignored by Richmond, one neighbor set out on a perilous journey to Richmond as the war was drawing to a conclusion and the south was in some chaos.

Coral is an 18-year-old confederate who has lost a foot in the war. He comes across a 20-year-old Union soldier who has escaped from Andersonville with a lost hand. This unlikely pair become friends in a touching story at the end of the book. A confederate father who had lost three sons joins them at the end as they manufacture a peg leg for the lost foot. And then the Union soldier heads off seeking freedom and having found unlikely friendship. This story might just make the whole book worthwhile.

Andersonville existed for 19 months and at one time held as many as 33,000 union prisoners although it was initially intended for only 10,000. It achieved a certain infamy has 14,000 soldiers died there. This book is filled with horror and humanity. The book begins and ends with the man who owned the land where the 27 acre stockade was constructed. He owned slaves and loved nature and felt himself to be a decent man. There is also the story of captain Wirtz who was the commandant of Andersonville and tried he thought to run a good facility even though he was never given the supplies and resources he needed do I send more prisoners then he could handle. He thought he was a good and kind person who followed orders.

This book was published in 1955 and the audible version which I just listened to was recorded 60 years later.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am curious how a work enters the Contemporary Canon. Who or what decides if any given literary piece survives beyond its publication as some type of icon, valued for its uniqueness or literary strength? And indeed, how is “uniqueness” determined or defined and by whom?

McKinley Kantor’s “Andersonville” was a hit in the wake of its publication in 1955. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956; was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, was well-reviewed and long remained on the best seller list. I remember when it came into our house as a hardcover that prominently weighted our bookshelf after my parents devoured it and invited extended discussions about the Civil War. It was Kantor’s masterpiece, prepared over 25 years of research and investigation. Bruce Catton called it "the best Civil War novel I have ever read."

Although it long enjoyed both popularity and financial success in the wake of its publication, my sense is that it is not considered today as a part of the Contemporary Canon. It certainly does not figure in any of the more common lists of notable fiction from the XX Century and I would be surprised to find it listed in a major bibliography of selected, fiction works dealing with the Civil War.

Perhaps one reason why it has slipped into oblivion is that its structure is antithetical to contemporary tastes. The current age is mesmerized by hagiographies infrequently written by professional historians. In both histories and historical novels, preferences run to a central figure whose actions or inactions thread dominantly through the work. Biographies, for example, of the Founding Fathers are today’s rage. In “Andersonville”, there is no central figure outside the prison itself. The plantation owner, Ira Claffey, opens and closes the novel, but he does not control the action. Rather, the work is a collection of vignettes of a large number of ordinary people (some historical but most fictional) of whom Claffey is merely one. It resembles more closely the work of the social historians who might seem uninterested in sketching for the reader a broader narrative synthesis and thus are less attractive to the general public.

There is also the length of the novel. At 760 word-packed pages, it probably tries the patience of readers who prefer tighter editing. Also, several reviewers have been negatively critical of Kantor’s failure to mark dialogue clearly. Exposition and conversation run together, without identifying punctuation, causing frustration and confusion among some readers.

Yet, although the novel may have escaped a place among the XX Century American Canon, it is still an engaging and informative read, stylistically strong. It captures in effortless prose the Nation toward the latter part of the armed conflict when the Union’s defeat of the Confederacy is all too apparent as are the horrors of the unexpectedly lengthy war.

Andersonville the prison, run by the Confederacy to hold captured Union soldiers, is the scene of human depravity both inside the stockade and outside. And Kantor captures that depravity in its full dimension. You see it, feel it, hear it, taste it and smell it. During the 14 months of its existence (1864-1865), more than 45,000 Union soldiers were confined there and some 13,000 died, wasted away from starvation, exposure to the elements, overcrowding and disease.

In Kantor’s telling, death stalks life; the strong pray on the weak; humanity is redefined without redemption; indifference replaces compassion. It is the story of ordinary people mutating into animals during uncommon times.

Although Andersonville prison—its community of guards, prisoners and neighbors—is the focal point of the novel, Kantor gives each of the people he highlights deep histories. His people come from rural and urban roots: farmers, landowners, artisans, professionals, slaves, vagabonds, seamen, ruffians and hooligans, traders and merchants. In their composite, they and their families are a microcosm of American society of the 1860s, mutilated and depressed by the barbarity of war.

While evil infuses the novel, it is not a hopeless world. Some humanity does survive. A physician labors to alleviate suffering even though his efforts are inadequate and unsuccessful; a handful of prisoners organize an internal policing effort to permanently stop a cadre of bullies and thugs (fellow prisoners themselves) from wanton exploitation. Toward the end of the novel, an escaped prisoner is befriended by one of the prison guards, forming, in the process, an ultimately deeply emotional and liberating friendship. But the examples of humanity and civility only underscore the basic brutality of Andersonville and, ultimately, of the Civil War itself.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I prophesy with all the terrible ardor I can muster: this will be a stench in the nostrils of history.

Perhaps the biggest disgrace in the entire history of the Civil War is the story of Andersonville. I wonder how MacKinlay Kantor bore to do the research and spend the time required with this material in order to tell this story. It is 766 pages of misery, sorrow, and shame.

What is somewhat amazing to me is that he was able to deal even-handedly with the civilian Southerners, who were also caught in this tragedy. There could have been an overwhelming temptation to paint everyone with the same brush, which, of course, would have been unfair but understandable in light of the egregiousness of this trespass against humanity.

Kantor said he began this project with his own experience in World War II in mind. He was among those who freed the camp at Buchenwald, and struggled with what to think of the German citizens who surrounded the camp and its horrors. He certainly did a marvelous job of separating the citizens, flawed though they certainly were, from the officers and guards at Andersonville. I felt it was clear that he believed the atrocities of Andersonville overshadowed any other aspect of leadership in the Southern ranks.

What matters a chivalrous Lee if we have a Winder? What matters the sacrifice of a Hood, if we have a Captain Wirz? What matters the competence of a Johnston or the spiritual strength of a sickly Stephens, if we have at home only the incompetence of venal surgeons, incompetence of a Seddon, frailty and futility of a sickly Seddon.

He has presented us with some very memorable and complex characters in Ira Claffey, Lucy Claffey and Harry Elkins. There is a growth of understanding in these people that one would surely hope to see in any human being bearing even the remotest witness to such a place. Ira, who has lost his three sons to the war and has sufficient reason to hate Northerners, comes full circle and performs several acts of kindness and bravery as he embraces again the idea that we are all humanity, regardless of our origins. And, he finds somewhere in the midst of all this loss and carnage a kind of hope.

But if he put mind and heart into the soil where his sons had gone, and where the human wastage of Andersonville had gone, and where that enormous blood-curdling fraction of America’s young males had gone, North and South--eventually the stalks might rise, toughen; beards would dry out, husks turn to parchment; and those hands who’d made his crop might reach in memory to carry him in salute to the crop, the fields, the earth itself.


Lucy, his daughter, and Harry Elkins, a young surgeon, who struggles with the conditions of the camp and the total lack of concern or decency from the officers, also struggle with how to keep a spark of love alive in the face of so much sorrow and hatred.

“I don’t believe he’s right. Do you? Shouldn’t love be bigger than--? And embrace more than just--? I mean, whether there were a stockade and a hospital or not? Or even a war. Seems like there’ve always been wars going on, one place or another. And boys dying in them. But people still managed to love one another.”

But, this is not primarily a Southern tale, this is to a greater extent a Northern one. Interspersed with the events that are the lives of the families Claffey and Tebbs, Kantor tells us, in detail, the lives of the true victims of this sinkhole, and he paints for us no happy endings, because those were almost unknown in Andersonville. The lives of Eben Dolliver, Edward Blamey, Nathan Dreyfoos, Eric Torrioson are imprinted on me forever, along with the disgusting likes of Willie Collins, who is among those who are hanged by the prisoners themselves for the crimes they commit against their fellows.

The carnage, the suffering, was so extreme, I had to stop often and just take refuge from the camp myself. I kept hoping for someone to escape, someone to prevail, then for someone to just survive, but over and over again, Kantor told me this is fiction that is history and I will not change the outcome for any of these men. I wept when Eric, who tried to escape by pretending to be dead and lying among the rotted bodies in the death house, a feat that was only possible because the living and the dead were almost indistinguishable, became one of their number.

I was elated to read the story of Nazareth Stricker, who is saved by a rebel soldier, Coral Tebbs, in the most unlikely but believable turn of events in the book. But, this elation was tempered by the knowledge of how many, some 14,000 men, had not been so lucky.

The cruelty of General John Winder and Captain Henry Wirz, if even remotely as chronicled, merits them a special place in hell. I feel sure Dante would place them in the seventh circle of hell and we would find them submerged in the boiling blood of human beings, right up to their eyebrows, for all eternity.

I have tried to review this book on its own merits. It is a work of fiction, but based on history. I am not sure anyone actually knows the entire truth of Andersonville. The victors write the history, and there are certainly alternative views of this one, as there are of anything part of a distant war. Noted historian Shelby Foote has said when asked about Andersonville:

“there’s no attention to Camp Chase or any of the northern camps. And that’s wrong. They were almost as bad. And less forgivable, because those prisoners in Andersonville got the rations the Confederate soldier was getting. The southern prisoners in northern camps did not get the rations northern soldiers were getting. Many of the deaths in northern camps were due to cold weather at Lake Michigan and other places where they didn’t have blankets to cover themselves with and so forth.”

Kantor clearly says that the prisoners at Andersonville did not get the same rations as Confederate soldiers, so one or the other of these men is wrong. Kantor is writing fiction, so perhaps this is a license he has taken. No such license is needed--this tragedy is sufficient without embellishment. It is also, however, immaterial whether atrocities were committed elsewhere, nothing erases what happened here. Perhaps it is the sheer numbers that overwhelm; 14,000 men died at Andersonville, 2000 men died at Camp Chase.

Nothing mitigates the horror of war. When will we ever learn?


A note beyond the scope of the book, which ends with the liberation of Andersonville: Henry Wirz was the only officer executed for war crimes in the Civil War.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will admit that I have very little knowledge of American history, including the American Civil War. As a reader, I have found that historical fiction is a good place to begin when you are starting out to investigate a subject and “Andersonville,” seemed to come up again and again in lists of novels which best explore, and explain, the Civil War.

It is a huge book (not available in kindle in the UK, so this is really a door-stopper of a novel), standing at over 750 pages and with an enormous cast of characters. The author does an incredible job of setting the scene, as we begin with plantation owner, Ira Claffey, and are gradually introduced to his family and neighbours. Ira has lost three sons to the war, his wife is descending into deep depression and his daughter, Lucy, has seen the man she was to marry also killed.

Ira Claffey is a slave owner; yet, paradoxically, he also sees himself as a good man. His family, his whole way of life is under threat, and yet he views himself as a benevolent father figure and is concerned that, if his slaves are given freedom, they will be unable to care for themselves. Throughout this book, we see how Ira’s views change and we witness events from the point of view of many of his household and his neighbours. These include a poor, white family, named the Tebbs; including ‘Widow Tebbs’ who flagrantly makes her living from the attentions of the many men who visit her shabby house, and her tribe of children.

Near the beginning of this novel, Ira is approached by men looking for a site in which to keep Yankee prisoners. This is the beginning of Camp Sumter, which will become known as the notorious “Andersonville,” prison camp. Henry Wirz is the German speaking superintendant of the stockade, who suffers constantly from a wound in his arm and is unable to muster respect from either his superiors, so relies on hatred and fear to rule. There is also the bookish medic, Harrell Elkins, who knew Ira Claffey’s sons and is concerned at what he sees in the building of the camp.

Indeed, there is not really any building at all – other than a stockade. There is no shelter from rain, or sun. No attempt to make the camp liveable or provide reasonable conditions for the prisoners herded inside the walls. This means that, certainly at the beginning, the fittest survive and the weakest find themselves at the mercy of those able to physically attack and abuse them. With rations infrequent and insufficient, no shelter, sickness rife and a lack of leadership, the place descends into a living hell. Meanwhile, locals, like Claffey become aware of what is going on and struggle with their consciences at seeing their ‘enemies’ so degraded.

This is a book which requires commitment and time to read. There are endless characters and stories from both inside, and outside, the camp. We are introduced to the ‘raiders’ who control the camp, such as Willie Collins. There is the cultured, Jewish prisoner, Nathan Dreyfoos and the man who befriends him, Seneca MacBean. Eben who loved birds and Father Peter Shelen who ministers to the dead and dying. There is bravery, defiance, horror and shame, as the men suffer and die, and yet keep arriving to suffer and die…
One of the things which really interested me about this novel were how many of those involved were first generation immigrants. Nathan Dreyfoos, for example, does not consider even joining the war until a chance encounter causes him to join up. Many of those involved are German (including Wirz), Irish, or from a whole host of other countries. As such, we hear their back stories and what led them to this point and also of the despair, and the futility, that those outside the stockade feel as the horror of the camp unfolds.

It is also interesting that the author mentions that Ira Claffey and his family can actually ‘smell’ the camp from their house, and has parallels perhaps with people in small towns near concentration camps, in the Second World War, who denied any knowledge of what unfolded so close to where they live. For it is apparent that people talk and gossip, and that Claffey, and his neighbours, are obviously interested; going to view the initial building, going to witness the first prisoners arrive and have a more obviously human interest in what is going on so close to them which is much more believable. It is also clear that what they see eventually shocks them to the core.

Events at Andersonville will change the people involved, and may change you as a reader. This is a novel which is vast in scope and which I am glad I have read. I feel it did give me some understanding of (some, at least) of the events in the American Civil War. Although it is an uncomfortable read, for much of the time, it was a rewarding one and I am glad that I finally got around to reading it – having meant to do so for a long time.

[Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont · Rating 5 out of 5]

Try to imagine a place worse than Dachau. It’s impossible, you say. Then imagine, if you will, Dachau just as overcrowded but without the huts, without a clean water supply, without any kind of sanitation; just a palisade with watchtowers around an open field. Imagine people, thousands of people, suffering in confined conditions under an open sky, winter and summer, the only source of water being a marshy stream which rapidly turns into a sewer, a breeding ground for maggots and disease. This is not Germany; this is not Dachau. This is America; this is Andersonville.

Thanks to Ike Jakson, a fellow blogger, I’ve read Andersonville, the 1955 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by MacKinlay Kantor. It’s set during the American Civil War, for the most part in and around Andersonville, a prisoner of war camp near the town of Anderson in Georgia, which opened in February 1864. In just over twenty-six acres thousands of Union prisoners were penned as in a zoo, with no shelter other than their own rough shebangs, holes dug in the ground, covered with blankets or coats propped up with sticks. In the year or so it was open an estimated 45 thousand men passed through its gates; almost 13 thousand never passed out again, other than to the grave, dead of malnutrition, neglect, malaria, diarrhoea, scurvy and gangrene.

Andersonville is a powerful novel, one of the most powerful I’ve ever read, and I say that without a trace of exaggeration. Kantor spent years on background research, evidenced in his writing, material he handles with ease, fully digested, unlike so many other historical novels. It could, given the subject, have been an angry book, a bleak book, but it’s not; it’s a book full of gentle understanding and humanity. There are parts that are difficult to read, there is real horror, but there is nothing lurid, nothing overstated in Kantor’s treatment.

It’s a mixture of fact and fiction, a mixture of real people and wholly believable characters: unforgettable characters like Ira Claffey and his daughter Lucy, who live on a plantation close to the camp, and Nathan Dreyfoos, a cultured man, a Union prisoner, carried to Andersonville by chance and fate. There are others, large and small, people the author takes from their homes and guides them through his pages, sometimes invisible, other times not. It’s a story, in so many ways, of intersected lives and intersected destinies.

In Dachau the Nazis imposed a brutish order, with guards in the camp and designated block orderlies. In Andersonville, or Camp Sumter, to give its official name, there was no order or policing. The authorities stayed outside for the most part, allowing the prisoners to manage the best they could. The worst was a kind of jungle, a Darwinian struggle of the strong against the weak.

For me this was the most depressing part of the story, that predatory gangs known as Raiders organised themselves to steal from their already impoverished comrades, not stopping short of murder. This is not fiction; this really happened and it continued to happen until other prisoners formed their own police force, the Regulators, imposing a kind of order in the midst of misery. The order went so far as trying and condemning the leaders of the Raiders, a process carried out with the cooperation of the camp authorities.

The authority, the person with immediate responsibility for Andersonville, was one Captain Henry Wirz, of Swiss German origin, the only person convicted and executed after the Civil War of what we now refer to as war crimes. Kantor does not condemn him, no; he merely presents him as a self-pitying, ineffectual and rather wretched little man, an obvious scapegoat. His greater culprit is General John H Winder,responsible for the whole of the Confederate prison system, depicted as a callous and brutish individual who, along with his son, is alleged to have deliberately engineered death by neglect.

It’s as well to remember, though, that Andersonville is a novel, not a history. In the spirit of poetic licence some liberties are taken with the facts. There is not the least doubt about the callous indifference with which many of the Confederate authorities perceived the Union prisoners, but the camp opened at a time when the Southern state itself was dying; at a time when supply was breaking down, when shortages were commonplace; a time when even soldiers in the field went hungry. This is not to excuse what happened at Andersonville, to excuse the dehumanisation, merely to offer a wider understanding.

Of the dozens of novels I’ve read this year Andersonville is by far the best, only equalled by Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, by coincidence another account set against a background of war. Kantor writes in a lucid and compelling fashion, a narrative that quickly engages and carries one along. He writes in a wholly believable way about wholly believable people. Some books are instantly forgettable, no matter how enjoyable. This is a book that cannot be forgotten, one destined to leave a perpetual afterimage in my mind.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a long and difficult novel about a forgotten atrocity from the American Civil War, the Confederate prison in Andersonville, GA. If there had been ovens available, it would have been an American Auschwitz. The Greys murdered tens of thousands of Union prisoners through starvation, poisoning, and disease as their illegal war wound down into ignominy. The story is told from many, many perspectives and with many unquoted voices. It is easy to determine the speaker, but the shifting around gets tedious at times. No one gets off easy here, and the reader is presented with all the horrors with a massive dose of violence which is sometimes difficult to support. I found that the rape of one of the girls from town was particularly disturbing. The author spent 25 years (!!) researching this catastrophe and poured his soul into this, his masterwork.
I have to give it four stars for the effort and the quality of the writing, but there is still something missing here in terms of a protagonist that I can really sympathize with and that grows with the story. I do, however, fully agree with the 1956 Pulitzer attribution to this interesting book.

My Pulitzer winner's list here
Only 6 to go and I will have finished them all!

[Feliks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any five chapters of this novel --take them in a row, or cherry-pick--are more authoritative, more astutely conceived and better executed than--well--really, you'll find them better than any American novel written today.

With the possible exception of more titles of true stature coming from recluse Thomas Pynchon (unlikely) there is basically no author alive in this country right now, who can write at this level. This is a caliber of novel which has essentially disappeared from our national literature. Contemporary readers can't handle something like this. No one today has the patience. No one would sit still long enough to travel back in time, to the American Civil War. They wouldn't stand for it.

The rewards of tackling a novel this vast are assured; but admittedly, this is a difficult book. You need to rise to meet the challenge. 'Andersonville' can be very ponderous, lugubrious, and slow-moving; it is introspective; it deals with vanished seas of thought and feeling in American life. It is chock-full with the unfamiliar and the never-before-treated. You will knit your brow--pause--and squint--very often during its length. Certain paragraphs take several re-readings. But it is your responsibility to measure up. Kantor will not hold your hand with footnotes or asides. He expects you to keep up with him (audiences were entirely capable of this, at one time).

'Andersonville' dwells on the most minute and plodding detail of setting, wardrobe, habit, and speech, for its timeperiod. In the course of this sweeping work of history, you will learn what songs were hummed in the Civil War era, what scripture people commonly quoted to one another. What poems they recited. You will learn all about Abraham Lincoln-era diseases, jokes, cannons, sabers, farming techniques, locomotive trains. How Americans drew their drinking water, raised vegetables, how they washed; how they slept; how they ran their households; how they managed livestock. You will discover what medicine they relied on, what food they ate, what utensils they ate with, what they carried in their pockets, what shoes they wore; how they rigged their horses and oxen. This is the overwhelming fabric which is woven into this story. It's enormous and staggering. Its not too much to say that this is one of the all-time greatest feats of descriptive prose you will ever encounter.

Technically speaking: Kantor has some ingenious narrative tricks I've rarely--if ever seen done. Chapter after chapter--he switches POV from one character to another; shifts from one setting to another; one conversation to another; one voice to another; one flow of thought to another--sometimes all in the space of one page. Its beautifully handled. Fluid and confident authorship.

There are many passages of stark, somber, pastoral beauty. Other parts are rib-bustingly funny, hoot-out-loud hilarious. Other parts will turn you green and make you queasy. Kantor will take you to the filthiest tenement in pre-Tweed Manhattan; to dusty wagon roads in Ohio; then to a battlefield in Tennessee, then a railway bridge in Lousiana, then a general store in Pennsylvania, then to a Bible meeting in Massachussets, then to an ironclad warship off the coast of Richmond.

All of these places are filled-to-overflowing with conversation and incident. Women in hoopskirts; men in uniforms; whiskers and beards everywhere. Tykes in britches and ministers in frock-coats; doctors, butchers, muleskinners, gravediggers, drovers, farriers, ostlers, carters, fieldhands, prison guards, prostitutes, sailors. Bullies, braggarts, weaklings, cheats, sneaks. It is a slice of our world at the time in question.

Also I must remark that 'Andersonville' is one of the great 'food' novels. There is a mind-boggling cornucopia of foodstuffs, described in this story. Never seen the beat of it. Kantor exhausts the English vocabulary on his treatment of Civil War-era food. It will make your stomach rumble and mouth water when you read some of these meals.

It is also one of the great physical, brawny, stories ever; by this I mean villains just about as formidable, as ugly, despicable and menacing as found in anything by Dickens. Far worse. Violent men. And they need to be beaten down by good men. Hand-to-hand. Muscle vs muscle and brute vs brute. Ferocious amounts of blood and pain and upheaval. Melees. Mano a' mano combat.

Overall it is a sad book; a book that goes into frank, gruesome detail towards our humanity. Sex and filth and hunger. Revenge and stupidity and rage. Loneliness, hopelessness, despair. Insanity. Men raping one another, beating on each other, stealing from one another, cold-bloodedly killing each other. Executing each other. Maiming each other. You will read about urine and feces and pus and bile and lice and rotten flesh and frostbite and bedbugs and gout and vomit. Scurvy, diarrhea, dropsy, ague, malnutrition, and shrapnel. Half-dead stick-men shuffle from page to page, their skin covered with open, oozing sores.

It is sad. But it is epic. Perhaps the greatest epic yet written about our land. How many others are there like it? How few decades have passed since this work--and all it upholds-- has already been forgotten? What would our culture resemble, if there were many such books as this? Compare Kantor's example to that of Dante. What Dante did for Italy, we can not find the equivalent for; yet we're in arguably more need. We need more books like this. Our tragically short memory spans are killing us!

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I became aware of the novel Andersonville in high school when I noticed a friend reading it, not for a class but on his own initiative. I asked him a little about it, and it stuck in my memory. Many years later I finally decided to read it.

Andersonville follows the creation, expansion, management and hurried dismantling of a Confederate prison camp near the town of Anderson, Georgia from 1864 to 1865. Published in 1955 and winner of The Pulitzer Prize in that year, the novel opens with plantation owner Ira Claffey encountering Confederate officers surveying land for the prison camp. Ira has already lost two sons to the war and will soon lose his third and last. He lives on the plantation with his wife and his daughter, Lucy.

Andersonville is epic historical fiction, epic in scope and length, but not typical. The novel is populated by a mixture of actual and fictional characters. The point of view and setting switches almost every chapter, and yet the whole, while in general slow-moving and often introspective, holds together well and flows smoothly. Kantor spent over 10 years researching the novel and it shows. The locale, weather, terrain, food and clothing are all described in rich detail. Kantor wrote about the time he spent in Andersonville: “Regulations declare that a United States Military Cemetery may not be visited at night; yet on occasion I had sinned so, and had not felt myself a sinner; I’d felt that I belonged there.”

Rather than a prison camp, Andersonville was more a death camp. There was no shelter for the prisoners and the space was intended for less than 1/5 of the eventual population. In fact, General John Winder, the officer in charge of most of the Confederate prison camps appeared to have an end objective of using the camps to kill as many Union soldiers as possible. The prisoners were not provided with or ensured a fresh water source. There was no sanitation system. Because the camp was created so late in the war, food and medical supplies were scarce and inconsistent. The prisoners were starving, susceptible to every nutrient-based deficiency and ravaged by disease for which their environment is a petri dish.

The novel does not have a typical plot but instead follows the lives impacted by the camp. It is survival or death, hunger and thirst, illness and deprivation, the cold and the heat. While the narrative style is traditional in many ways, the story related is a horrible one through which the desire to survive, along with stories of kindness, optimism and love do occasionally shine through.

[Tracy Towley · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was ridiculously awful.

The worst part was how, for the first 50 pages or so, I thought it was going to be super bad ass awesome. It was about a southern town (Anderson) where a prison was built during the civil war. The first chapter was about the family whose land was taken by the rebels in order to build this prison. The characters were rich, engaging and conflicted.

However, it turned out that basically every chapter is full of new people. There was a very small continuing plot line, but for the most part it was disjointed tellings of the atrocities in this prison. Incredibly graphic passages abounded, and while I did care in that "I care that any human was treated this way," kind of way, I did not care in an, "I know and care about this character specifically," kind of way.

Also, Kantor felt the need to not include any quotation marks in the book. Half the time I didn't even realize someone was talking until halfway through their speech. Not cool my friend. Not cool.

I actually only made it about 750 pages into this 900+ page book. Typically I will finish a book no matter what, but when there is no real continuing plot and I hated it as much as I did, I didn't really see a purpose.

The author clearly did his research, and wanted to include every morsel of it, and I can see why Civil War buffs might care about this book. It was not for me though.

[Porter Broyles · Rating 2 out of 5]

As they say in comedy, timing is everything.

If I read this at any time other than the height of the George Floyd protests, I might have walked away with a different view. And I'll be honest, I'm loath to give a book 1 star---especially a Pulitzer Prize winning novel that is not half bad (even if it is historically flawed).

So why the one star?

Because this book sells, what has become known as Frederick Douglass' "the happy slave myth."

Near the end of the book, the South has lost and slave owner comes to tell his slaves that they are free. He informs them that they are now free, but that if they stay he'll provide for them (less a fair expenses). They respond with:

Oh no Massa, you are our Massa, and we are loyal to you! We are gonna stay loyal to you because you was such a good Massa. We won't go any where without you. We are so thankful because you took such good care of us, and were so fair to us, and we love you massa.

And of course, the slave owner has to pontificate about how fair an just he was to his slaves.

Still, two slaves and their families choose to leave. He tries to talk them out of leaving, but when they insist on leaving, he's the generous Massa. He provides them with food for their journey and a letter extolling their virtues for a future employer. The letter also instructs those who might stop them to leave them in peace.

After they leave, he reflects upon how it does not surprise him that they were the two slaves who left because they were the smartest of the slaves, and their chosing to leave gives him hope that someday the negro may actually amount to something.

As a history buff, I was already having some problems with the historical errors of the book, but I was willing to overlook them because this is fiction, but in the context of the current sensativities to Black Lives Matter, I can't ignore it---even if it was a short section.

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andersonville is one of those names from American Civil War history that a lot of Civil War buffs don’t want to bring up. Say “Gettysburg” or “Antietam,” “Shiloh” or “Chickamauga,” and immediately what comes to mind is the epic combat action that took place on those battlefields: strategy and tactics, and the heroism of individual units and soldiers. Andersonville, on the other hand, was not a battlefield, but rather a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. About 45,000 Union soldiers were held there, and almost 13,000 of them died amidst the filthy conditions of that overcrowded camp, making one’s odds of dying at Andersonville slightly higher than one in four. How strange, and in a way how appropriate, that one of the best-known and most critically praised novels of the Civil War is not a Homeric battle narrative, but rather is MacKinlay Kantor’s 1955 novel Andersonville.

Kantor was a highly popular novelist of the mid-20th century; one of his stories was adapted into the Oscar-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a look at the challenges that World War II veterans faced while adjusting to civilian life. And Kantor had treated Civil War-related subject matter before, when he wrote Long Remember, a fine novel showing how the lives of Pennsylvania civilians were forever changed when their peaceful Adams County homes became the site of the Battle of Gettysburg.

But Kantor’s somewhat abstract pre-war interest in writing a novel about Andersonville became decidedly less abstract when, as a World War II combat correspondent, he visited the Nazis’ Buchenwald death camp shortly after its April 1945 liberation by American forces. He later told an interviewer that, while standing amidst the incomprehensible horrors of Buchenwald’s sights and sounds and smells, he knew that he would one day write a novel about Andersonville.

Kantor’s Andersonville begins with the camp being hacked out of the southwest Georgia wilderness, to the considerable concern of nearby residents like planter Ira Claffey and his daughter Lucy. Claffey, a decent and well-educated fellow, seems to be in the novel as part of Kantor’s attempt to work out for himself how thousands of otherwise decent and well-educated people could engage in the indecency of slaveholding. In novelistic terms, Claffey provides the reader with a civilian’s, outsider’s view, permitting the reader to be introduced gradually to the growing horror of the camp.

The research that Kantor did for Andersonville shows, as real-life participants in the terrifying drama of Andersonville are a presence throughout the book. John Ransom, the Michigan cavalryman whose Andersonville Diary (1881) is one of the classic accounts of prisoner life in the camp, is a presence in the book: “Johnny Ransom had a broken stub of pencil, and he chewed the pencil and made it smaller and found difficulty in writing with it; but he was determined to write a diary” (p. 188). The better you know the history of Andersonville, the more you will enjoy the way Kantor brings together real historical figures of Andersonville with characters he has created.

Sympathetic Southern characters in Andersonville, along with Ira and Lucy Claffey, include a conscientious surgeon named Harrell Elkins, who hopes that his efforts can relieve the unfortunate prisoners at Andersonville. But Elkins might as well be trying to bail out the sea. The camp’s commandant, Captain Henry Wirz, is a martinet whose congenital bad temper is perpetually aggravated by the pain of an arm wound that he received at the battle of Seven Pines in Virginia; his rule of the camp is negligent at best, criminal at worst. Wirz’s German heritage (even though he was actually Swiss) is emphasized, with his character regularly speaking in German when he is not forced to switch into heavily German-accented English. And Wirz’s superior, General John Winder, openly expresses his hope that the Andersonville camp will kill as many people as possible: “I’ve got a pen here that ought to kill more God damn Yankees than you ever saw killed at the front” (p. 110). Winder, a notoriously disagreeable man in real life, here sounds very much like one of the Nazi camp commandants whose monstrous handiwork Kantor had seen at the liberation of Buchenwald.

The parallels between Andersonville on the one hand, and the Nazi death camps of the Second World War on the other, come into further relief when Kantor introduces us to one of the main Unionist characters, a Jewish sergeant named Nathan Dreyfoos. His surname reminds the reader of Alfred Dreyfus (the French Army officer of Jewish heritage who suffered unjustly, for a crime that he did not commit, because of an anti-Semitic conspiracy), and Nathan Dreyfoos himself is truly a good man, a mensch. Before the war, he was “dedicated to the eventual comfort and enrichment of humanity” (200); during the war, he fought with courage and honor for a righteous cause; and now that he and his men are captives at Andersonville, he watches out for the welfare of his men, determined to protect them from the many dangers of the camp. Nathan Dreyfoos’s status as a good and guiltless Jewish man in a camp run by a mercurial and frequently cruel German-speaking officer makes the World War II parallels that Kantor wants to draw in Andersonville unmistakable.

The main dramatic plotlines are twofold. Newcomers to the camp quickly learn that they face danger from people who are theoretically on their side in that war – “Collins’s Raiders,” Union Army renegades and bounty jumpers who, unrestrained by the camp’s Confederate administrators, have formed a gang to rob and beat and even kill their fellow Unionists. As in the history of Andersonville, so in Kantor’s novel, the law-abiding majority form a group of “Regulators” who eventually are able to put down the tyranny of Collins’s Raiders. But even when Collins’s Raiders are gone, the other terrors of Andersonville remain – lack of shelter; inadequate food; a polluted water supply; omnipresent disease; and guards who are ready to shoot any man who steps beyond, or even near, the camp’s “dead line” inside the stockade. The men die rapidly, and Kantor’s descriptions of their suffering are numerous and grim.

When it was published in 1955, Andersonville was praised as “the best novel of the Civil War” by Bruce Catton and Henry Steele Commager, two of the pre-eminent Civil War historians of the time. It is for you, the contemporary reader, to decide whether Kantor’s Andersonville exceeds the artistic achievement of other well-known Civil War novels – Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), say, or Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974). Just know, before you start reading this epic 760-page tome, that Andersonville is not a battlefield novel. The only battle you will read about in Andersonville is the fight to survive.

[Bookslut · Rating 1 out of 5]

How exciting. After nearly two years together, Andersonville and I are through. We had some good times--rare, and brief, and only within the last 200 pages--and we have a history, but it's time for me to move on. I didn't think it was possible for anything to sink my Pulitzer challenge, because after all, I'm 80 books and two decades in. Yet there were times I'd look at that beautiful cover and think 'I'd rather throw it all away than open you up one more time'. However, here we are, finished with each other, and my challenge lives to fight another day. I feel triumphant.

My quick post-breakup analysis is that this was an indulgent, waste of time book. It is one long bummer. The form in particular is punishing and creates no momentum, and it would be a slog at 350 pages. But it's 750. The awful nature of the narrative (combined with the length and form) was spirit-destroying. The last 200 pages were surprisingly rewarding, considering their predecessors, but not nearly rewarding enough to justify the book. For a really excellent and more thorough review, see my friend Jimmy's write-up here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
It expresses my thoughts almost exactly, with the caveat that I did not think the writing was especially good, and do not think Kantor is a good writer.

[Kirk Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more. This is a 5 star that I rate lower to discourage other readers. Looking through a reversed telescope at a prisoner of war camp, in fact a true death camp, is probably a subject for few readers. There is no glory of war in this book. It seems to be a true and accurate depiction of the worst War and human endeavors can produce. MacKinlay Kantor's writing is fluid and genius. There is also fortunately equal representation of the goodness and generosity of humankind or this book would be pure torture. As a historical novel: brilliant. Perhaps the most inglorious book ever written.

[Carol Storm · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.

It wasn't a terrible book, and I read all of it, which probably puts me in the minority. It was just sort of blah. As Agnes Mack said, there were so many characters that none of them ever become especially memorable.

There are other problems. While this book is not as racist as GONE WITH THE WIND, Kantor still takes a very tolerant view of slavery. All the slaveowners in the book are benign and enlightened, which is the oldest of Southern lies. One even brags that he whipped a male slave for beating his wife -- bet that didn't happen very often.

There are no Abolitionist Yankees, no black runaways, no-one to challenge the Southern view.

Oddly enough, the main conflict in the book is between the native Anglo-Saxon Yankee prisoners, and the "criminal" element. Kantor portrays the bad Yankees as 100% Irish, Catholic, and urban. While he certainly has the Irish gangster stereotype down pat, it would have been nice to see a few loyal Irish soldiers. At the very least, the evil Irish mob boss could have been more up front about their real reason for hating the war -- that is, hatred of the blacks competing for their jobs.

In the end, though, the book is so bland it's not even offensive when it's totally dishonest. GONE WITH THE WIND is hateful in many ways -- but it's never boring.

ANDERSONVILLE is just dull.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever had a book on your shelves that you know you will enjoy, except it’s sheer size makes you second guess yourself? What if I start it and it’s a slow, dull book? These thoughts and others kept me from picking up this book for years. But finally, I took the plunge, and guess what? It was fantastic!

Don’t get me wrong, it took me several weeks to finish this one. But, every page is worthy of the Pulitzer Prize it won following it’s release in 1955. The novel, set in Confederate Georgia, is about the infamous Andersonville prison. What I knew prior to reading the book was that it was large, crowded and most of the inmates died there from disease. I learned so much from this amazing work of historical fiction.

Kantor cleverly introduces you to characters in their home setting first. You get to know them and care for them, and them follow them on their journey into captivity. You feel their pain when they must sell some of their belongings for necessaries, before they even set foot in Andersonville. You cringe, when upon arrival, they are attacked by gangs of thugs for their last few possessions. You shake your head in disgust, as the rations are too small, and unfit for consumption anyway. And finally, you weep when each poor man meets his end.

It is really done so well. The prose, the introspection, and the stories that make sure you will never forget what took place in Andersonville Prison. It is heartbreaking and haunting, but it is also strangely uplifting. Kantor does not neglect to feed his readers a sense of hope, as he connects the characters in the book. He makes sure you understand that there is no North and South; no right and wrong in this war. There are only humans and our capacity for true humanity.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've known about this book since high school, but I never imagined I'd actually read it. Gone with the Wind I read 3 times in high school, but this lacked the romance that attracted me to GWTW. What a book! All 37 hours on audio. Narrator Gardner does a wonderful job sustaining the intensity of the story, individualizing characters--since it's all about the characters inside the barricades (prisoner, jailers, and camp officials) and the residents outside, many of them cultured southerners who were appalled by conditions. (Probably in real life as in the novel). Well-researched; written in polished (and even lyrical at the beginning and end) prose; a sobering, disturbing, moving tone; a compelling story of characters with flashbacks to earlier lives. A harrowing novel of the horrendous conditions at the notorious prison camp written in elegant, compelling prose.

[Doubledf99.99 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story is one the finest books about the Civil War I've read that is rich in prose and detail. Mr. Kantor immerses you into the woods and creek along the birds of the area of what will soon be Andersonville, and then he walks you through the gate into the brutal hellscape of Andersonville prison itself. You meet the Union prisoners on a personal level, some good and some evil the worst being those gangs from New York, then it's on to the Confederates, a few Generals who did their damnedest to make it miserable and unlivable and who criticized officers who wanted to improve conditions as traitors, the commandant Henry Wirz, and the guards. You have the civilian populace who live and farm in the area and a few who show some humanity towards the prisoners and there is one story of such humanity that made me misty-eyed. Great book, great read, and highly recommended.

[Darrin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found myself thinking one thing when I started the book and came out on the other side, thinking something else. Let me tackle these thoughts one by one.....

At first the lack of quotation marks bothered me and it made reading kind of off-putting. Coincidentally, however, I also read two other books while engaged in this one, Ali Smith's Autumn and Sok-Yong Hwang's At Dusk, both of which did not use quotation marks to set off spoken language. Ali Smith's book has a lot of qualities of poetry and oftentimes read like poetry and I felt certain that the lack of quotation marks added to this sense so I googled this writing style and sure enough came across an interesting article that made me more comfortable with the whole idea and also made a lot of sense...https://themillions.com/2015/04/unquo.... I also realized that I speak and read a language that doesn't use punctuation to mark dialogue. Korean uses affixed particles at the end of a verb to indicated quoted speech...a topic too lengthy to get into in this review but the point is, I was already used to this, I just had to tinker with my English language mindset. So the dialogue markers are all there, it is just getting used to the idea of reading a sentence and picking up on the idea that the character is speaking which, after a while, I became comfortable with and was more or less obvious.

Many chapters are prisoner stories...childhood until capture and imprisonment in Andersonville. Several that really stood out for me are the stories of Nathan Dreyfoos, Merry Kinsman, Eben Dolliver and Eric Torrosian. When I would come home at night I would commit to just reading one of these chapters and found many of them engrossing and poignant. If you are reading this book you know they don't end well but I still loved the backstories of who they were as people, how they grew up, their hopes and dreams...unfortunately it reminded me of victims' stories that are published in the media after a mass shooting.

I loved the story of the creation of the regulators and the demise of the raiders...the battle, defeat and ensuing trial of the raiders is one of the best parts of the book. I could say a lot more about the moral and religious questions posed in this part of the book but that will have to be for other reviewers. All the same I thought Kantor really posed some good questions and I thought using Father Peter Whelen's prayer as a refrain in the chapter dealing with the hanging of the raiders was very powerful.

For me, however, the best part of the book was the story of Claffeys and how much their lives were intertwined with the Andersonville stockade from it's inception and building on parts of their property to it's eventual demise at the end of the war. The father and daughter story of Ira and Lucy Claffey holds the book together and becomes the story that ties the book together at the end.

This is a 4.5 for me. There were times that Kantor spent paragraphs drifting off into obscure philosophical thought that early on was sometimes hard to follow but later I found that some of his best writing was contained in these paragraphs. I feel like Kantor had a very good grasp of human motivations and his writing is at times very insightful. He could have, however, said what he wanted to say in a shorter book.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Andersonville was the 5th of the five books starting with "A" on my i-Pod. Three of them concerned war -- WWII, WWI, and the American Civil War. All three supported my conviction that there is no glory in war, just horror for those who actually have to fight it. The focus of this war book was on prisoners of war, specifically those held at Andersonville during the American Civil War. The POAs were subjected to brutal conditions - no shelter, contaminated water, bullying (by guards and other prisoners), little food, among others.

The book was really long, overly so. There were some repetitions that an editor should have caught and remedied. But they were not what made it overly long.

There were parts of this book that I really liked -- the stories of certain prisoners what their lives were like before they ended up in Andersonville and the stories of certain of the guards, officers, and locals. There were other parts that I did not enjoy such as the developing romance of Lucy and the surgeon.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful fictionalized depiction of the horrors of the Confederate POW camp at Andersonville during the Civil War. The soldiers there suffered a nightmare existence, a large percentage dying of disease, starvation, or exposure - not because of malice on the part of the Southern authorities for the most part, but simply because of incompetence and indifference. After the war the commanding officer of the camp was tried for what would now be termed crimes against humanity and hanged, but in the name of justice several people above him in the chain of command probably should also have been prosecuted, because he had made some efforts to improve things - though not enough effort - but had not gotten much support from those to whom he reported. This is a haunting story and shows yet another side of warfare that is usually neglected by Hollywood.

[Peyton · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Pines, mountains, stones upon stones, the flat pocked farms below, the burned houses and disordered towns, the girl waving her kerchief, the crone spitting as the enemy passed, the armies squatting or moving […] and scattered, dotted singly or by couples or by dozens from Texas to the White Mountains and down to the lead-speckled clefts of Tennessee once more, there labored a pulse and breathing of fifty thousand men whose fate bayed behind them— never seen, never heard, but driving them with the dedicated relentlessness of time itself, driving them toward a common destination.”

What a fascinating and frustrating book! Andersonville, winner of the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is a long and sprawling novel about the titular American Civil War POW camp. This story follows the lives and deaths of several people on both sides of the war, primarily Confederates involved in the camp’s construction and administration and Union men and boys imprisoned within it.

I listened to the Andersonville audiobook narrated by Grover Gardner, which is over thirty-seven hours long. As I listened to Andersonville, I made frequent notes, only to later cross many of them out. Andersonville defies easy rating or categorisation. The length of the book, the enormity of its cast of characters, and the non-linearity of its plot make summarising Andersonville a challenge. The line between historical facts and dramatisation is blurry, and it was difficult for me to tease apart the prejudices of the era in which the book is set (1860s) from the prejudices of the era in which it was written (1950s).

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Reading Andersonville feels a lot like looking at Francis O’Dea’s drawing of Andersonville Prison. If you zoom out, it is difficult to comprehend the scale of what is depicted; but if you zoom in, you can see meticulously drawn images of individual prisoners and camp guards, as well as the details of structures and the landscape. Each chapter of Andersonville is a detailed close-up of a specific individual, part of the camp, or event pertaining to the camp. Andersonville’s non-linear storyline explores the backstories of various historical figures with the purpose of providing the reader with some understanding of how these individuals became who they are and why they arrived at Andersonville. Some characters are only featured in a single chapter, while others recur throughout the narrative.

Kantor begins Andersonville with this quote from the 1876 nonfiction work The Southern Side Or Andersonville Prison: “The future historian who shall undertake to write an unbiased story of the War between the States, will be compelled to weigh in the scales of justice all its parts and features; and if the revolting crimes . . . have indeed been committed, the perpetrators must be held accountable. Be they of the South or of the North, they can not escape history.” The Southern Side was written by Richard Randolph Stevenson, a Confederate surgeon who worked at Andersonville. In context, this quote is part of Stevenson’s self-professed attempt at “a refutation” of “the false allegations of the Northern historian” (Stevenson 6).

Kantor, a war journalist born and raised in Iowa, could easily be described as a ‘Northern historian’, which makes it interesting to reflect on why Kantor chose to open Andersonville with Stevenson’s quote instead of a quote from a POW survivor. Stevenson was clearly personally invested in downplaying the Confederacy’s crimes and equivocating the actions of the Union and the Confederacy. (Kantor, on the other hand, rooted out numerous inconsistencies and lies of omission in Confederate historical records during his research for this book. Andersonville actually includes a scene where Confederate officers argue about a record in which executions by hanging are recorded simply as deaths from ‘asphyxia.’)

But like any good opening quote, Stevenson’s words gradually take on greater meaning as the narrative unfolds. In this case, readers of Andersonville come to understand that the ‘perpetrators’ of ‘revolting crimes’ during the American Civil War include Union POWs who robbed and murdered one other. ‘Raiders’ not only beat their fellow prisoners and stabbed them with shivs; they also stole their food, clothing, shoes, blankets, and other necessities of survival, leaving them to die of so-called ‘natural causes.’ Willie Collins and other ‘Raiders’ are among the primary antagonists of Andersonville. Of course, we cannot forget who was ultimately responsible for locking so many vulnerable men and boys inside Andersonville with the ‘Raiders.’ Nor should we forget that the ‘Raiders’ were about a dozen men out of the tens of thousands of Union POWs sent to Andersonville or that the six main ‘Raiders’ were rounded up and punished by their own fellow prisoners, not their captors.

Andersonville is clearly a product of the 1950s, sometimes to an extent that feels discordant with the actual history being portrayed. Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville Prison, is written very much like a 1950s-era caricature of a frothing-at-the-mouth Nazi, even though the real-life Henry Wirz was Swiss, not German. This likely reflects authorial confusion or apathy about the difference between speaking the German language and being a German national.

In other ways, Andersonville inhabits its setting almost too convincingly. Consider, for example, the characterisation of Ira Claffey, the owner of a potato plantation near Andersonville. Ira Claffey owns slaves who he (and Kantor, as the narrator) refer to as ‘hands’ and ‘half-hands.’ These euphemistic terms somehow feel even more dehumanising than the term slave because they reduce enslaved people’s existence solely to their capacity for manual labour. Ira Claffey considers himself to be a benevolent slave owner and bafflingly cites the lack of rodent infestations in the slave quarters on his plantation as proof. Never mind the fact that Ira Claffey is an unapologetic serial rapist of enslaved girls, who he believes are grateful for his attentions.

Ira Claffey was written to be reflective of popular views during the American Civil War era, which I certainly can’t fault Kantor for, but I was never able to shake the sense that Kantor was sympathetic to Ira Claffey and his racism. The sharp contrast between Kantor’s relaxed attitude towards Ira Claffey and Kantor’s mockery and condemnation of villains like Henry Wirz and Willie Collins contributed to this impression.

I also felt that Kantor’s empathy for the Union POWs imprisoned in Andersonville was never extended to the Black people forced to work as slaves around Andersonville and the surrounding countryside. At the end of Andersonville, newly freed Black people faced with the choice to either stay in the South or migrate to the North or the West are portrayed as irrational and cowardly no matter where they choose to go. Kantor gives little thought to the trauma, mixed feelings, and uncertainty formerly enslaved people must have grappled with as they made this decision.

Kantor’s vivid, compelling writing belies scenes that are nauseating to visualise. I considered discussing many of these scenes – whether to warn other readers or simply to expunge them from my own mind, I’m not sure – but I ultimately discarded that section of this review. Let it suffice to say that Kantor conducted extensive research into the deplorable conditions at Andersonville and their impacts on the human body. Kantor must have researched not only the medical facts, but also the outdated theories and treatments that surrounded them in 1864.

Nevertheless, the stylistic complexity of the language used in Andersonville is truly impressive. Kantor was clearly of the school of thought that fiction should be challenging to read and thus all the more rewarding. Kantor also frequently waxes philosophically. As I have mentioned, Kantor’s views are not always agreeable – and he is occasionally too verbose for his own good – but there are chapters in Andersonville that took my breath away with their poignancy and literary brilliance. Take, for example, the chapter in which Eric, a child soldier imprisoned in Andersonville, falls ill and becomes too weak to speak and ultimately to move. A group of enslaved men forced to be undertakers mistakenly cart Eric to the overflowing camp morgue and leave him in a pile of decomposing bodies. As he lies there breathing quietly, Eric meditates on the experiences of life and death, once abstract but now very visceral to him, and reminisces wistfully about the fact that the dead men around him will never again feel the joy of playing with a kitten or petting a dog.

As time passes, Eric gradually recovers some of his strength and manages to sit up. He realises with a leap of hope that the morgue is located outside of the camp’s walls, which means that he is no longer trapped within Andersonville. Eric bolts into the night in an attempt to escape. Tragically, a nearby guard notices Eric and shoots the boy point blank in the heart, killing him instantly. I have read many historical novels about terrible things that have happened in the past, but not every historical novel makes me desperately want to reach into the past and change something for the characters. I deeply felt the emotions of the scene – confusion, fear, resignation, and frantic hope. This scene also transcends its historical specificity in that it is a timeless meditation on the ‘dark night of the soul’ and the capriciousness of fortune. In a true example of irony, Eric’s grave illness and placement in the morgue give him a second chance at life, however short-lived.

My reasons for picking up Andersonville were somewhat personal. One of my direct ancestors was a Union soldier who fought in the American Civil War. He eventually deserted and travelled west, settling in Idaho. My ancestor easily could have been one of the men who lived or died in Andersonville, and I have often wondered how my family’s story would have been different had he been captured.

Andersonville is an absolute must-read if you are interested in the American Civil War and/or prisoner of war narratives, but I would hesitate to recommend Andersonville anyone else. The graphic content, outdated attitudes, and sheer time investment are probably only worth it to readers deeply invested in exploring this specific chapter of history. I am proud that I finished Andersonville, but it was an emotionally exhausting experience.

[Kathy Scantle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This summer marked the 75th anniversary of the publication of Gone with the Wind and I suspect that's what got me interested in all things Civil War. Andersonville, the Pultizer Prize winning work of historical fiction written by MacKinlay Kantor, seemed a natural choice for my new interest in that period of American History. Having visited the Andersonville Prisoner of War Camp in South Georgia years ago, I already knoew a little about the horrors the Union soldiers suffered there.

Open for only 18 months, 52,000 Yankees were "housed" (although not my idea of housing) at this notorious POW camp known as Ft. Sumter and 13,000 of the soldiers died there. The 27 acre camp was surrounded by a stockade made of pine logs with a small creek that ran through the center. The residents had no shelter, except for makeshift tents for those who had the resources. This meant the prisoners had to suffer through intense heat in the Georgia summer, rain, and the cold of Georgia winter's with no defense. The creek became a combination of bathing, toileting, drinking, and disease. The men were given little or no fresh meat or vegetables and scant food in general. They suffered scurvy, gangrene, diarrhea, dysentery and various other life threating/ending diseases.

The author begins the book describing the account (fictitious) of the residents who live in this sleepy Southern town. Soon follows the building of the POW camp. After that, the author devotes each chapter to describing the residents of the POW camp. He begins the chapter with a background of the residents and brings each to their current condition in the camp. Some of his characters are based on fact as some soldiers left behind diaries. At the end of the book, as a reference, the author writes about some of the true characters, which I referred to as I was reading the book. He writes with such imagination and description of the characters and I found this stunning.

After reading this book, I'm sure to take another visit to the Andersonville POW camp.

[Jessica Gordon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want to give this book 2.5 stars but there is no such option. This book could have been good. There are so many things that would have made it good. But alas, it just didn't work for me. When a book is 1000 pages, I expect the characters to be thoroughly developed and the plot to be, well, a plot. I think these are minimal expectations.

Each chapter in this long book features characters who re imprisoned in Andersonville during the Civil War--a horrid outdoor prison in the south. In this prison, prisoners set all the rules and basic anarchy is the norm. Those who are physically strong run the prison because they can steal whatever and whenever they want.

Now, if there had been perhaps 10-12 characters and the author had alternated telling the story from each of their perspectives, that might have been a little hard to follow, but I would have enjoyed the book. I didn't count the number of characters whose stories are told, but it must be upward of thirty. Just when I would start to get to know a character and begin to sympathize with his story, a new story would begin. As you can imagine, this was very frustrating, and combined with the Civil War-time language, there wasn't much to find compelling.

To be fair, I will admit that a few characters reigned in the book and their stories were woven throughout. But since I am being fair, I should also admit that the author didn't always do a good job of weaving their stories together and by the time a character was brought back up, I often had to go back and find his previous story, perhaps several hundred pages earlier, so that I might remember who the hell he was.

I didn't buy this book because it was a Pulitzer Prize winner, but I was pleasantly surprised when I first received the book in the mail and learned that it had won this honor. I can see how this novel could have won the prize, had it been done successfully, but as it stands right now, I think the author was overly ambitious and what he tried to do, although brilliant in conception, was rather a failure in practice.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was interesting to me on several levels. First, I enjoy historical fiction in general, so I was predisposed to enjoy this. Second, I have a direct ancestor (my own grandfather's grandfather) who was a Union prisoner in this infamous prison for about 4 months, from July to November, 1864, so I felt I had a real stake in the story. After all, if David Bond had not survived his ordeal, I wouldn't be here to write this review. And third, this book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1956, the year I was 3 years old. The world has changed quite a bit since then, and since books often reflect not only the time period depicted in the story but also the time period in which they were written, I wanted to see if this book felt in any way "1950's" to me. It did, and for that reason, I would never (and I mean NEVER) recommend this book to a black friend or give it more than 3 stars. Every character in this book that was a person of color was described in negative terms. (And I don't mean by the slave-owning characters created by the author, whose opinions and expressions would be accurate for the time period, but by the author himself.) Not one black character was written with any real compassion or described as truly competent. This made ME (white and middle class) deeply uncomfortable. I can't imagine what feelings it would invoke in a black reader. (Or rather, I can imagine them, and so I would never suggest they read this!)

However, as a humanizing description of a particularly hideous event in American military history, making the reader care for the men imprisoned in Andersonville as individuals and not faceless statistics, the book does indeed succeed quite well. In my particular case, I found myself unusually emotionally invested in the survival of the characters I most liked and felt real sadness when -- true to the event -- most of them didn't make it. Fortunately for me, David Bond did.

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

A fundamentally fascinating history made unpalatable by the entrenched racism of the author and the reams of indigestible prose. One can often make the case that judging an author by today's mores is to retroactively judge them unfairly. In this particular instance however the entire book was poisoned as it should have been a story of incredible unflinching veracity of the horrors of war not the horrors of war seen through the patroniszing eyes of a southern apologist.

The book is epic in ambition and in unveiling the horrors the union prisoners of war were forced to endure in andersonville occasionally reaches its ambitions, but unlike other reviewers I don't think it can hold a candle to books like life and war, war and peace or those by Primo Levi. Why? Because the fundamental tenet of those books was universal truth deployed in beautiful language. Despite its ambitions and despite the plaudits, this book had neither.

[Tara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh, this book was painful to get through, and I only persevered because I was reading it for a book club. Meandering, overwrought, and muddled, the story skips around randomly from character to character with no discernible rhyme or reason. It takes about 3/4 of the way through the book before you have a solid grasp of who is who, and what their relation is to the other characters. The attempt at "authentic" language is cloying and painful at points (perhaps not aided by the narrator's strategy in the Audible version). There are some aspects of the story that are touching and heart-wrenching, which is the only reason this book did not get 1 star. How this ever won the Pulitzer, I have no idea.

[Casey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was so promising and I couldn't wait to delve in, despite its 700+ pages. I slogged through, painfully, to Page 43, then checked the reviews. Many were, amazingly, 5 stars, including some of my favorite GR friends. Then I read on to the negative reviews and decided to quit. What a relief. The writing did not flow at all, thus the "slogging." And with no quotation marks, I had to figure out which part was dialog mixed into the narration.

I could kind of see what was developing. Injured Rebs returning home, in one case missing a foot and mad about it, and wanting to hurt or kill Yankees in revenge. They would likely be hired at the prison, giving them lots of opportunities.

But I still want to learn about Andersonville and welcome any other book suggestions.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book up at Grandmother's cottage in Michigan when I was a kid. Someone, a guest perhaps, had probably brought it up to read over their vacation. In any case, like many of the books I read in childhood, this one was just laying around and I, being daily reminded of the centennial of the War Between the States, thought it would be interesting. What it was, however, was mortifying--quite the antidote to all the films and television shows glorifying the war.

[Val · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andersonville was a prison camp for Union soldiers during the American Civil War. The author uses the facts and some historical characters, blended with fictional ones, to tell the story of the camp and the wider war.
The story flows chronologically, but is interrupted by the life stories of several of those incarcerated. It was a brutal, dehumanising place and the intrusions remind us that there were real people behind the facts. The book is an impressive one; the story is a sad one.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Epic and amazing.