Andersonville
by MacKinlay Kantor
Summary
Andersonville was the Confederate prison pen in Georgia where, in the last fourteen months of the Civil War, some thirteen thousand Union prisoners died of starvation, exposure and disease inside a stockade built for a fraction of the number it held. Kantor's novel takes that fact and builds a panorama on it: not one hero's story but dozens of them, braided.
The prisoners carry most of it. Farm boys, city clerks, immigrants and veterans arrive train by train, learn the economy of the stockade, the shebangs, the trading, the dead line the guards shoot men for touching, and either hold onto themselves or do not. Some men starve and some thrive, and the book is unblinking about the fact that the thriving was mostly theft. The Raiders, prisoners turned predators under William Collins, rob and murder the weak until the camp itself organises, tries them, and hangs the ringleaders, one of the book's great set pieces and a matter of record. Real figures and invented ones share the pages throughout, and Kantor does not mark the seams. Outside the walls, the Claffey plantation household watches the horror grow in its neighbourhood, and its decent people discover what decency is worth beside a catastrophe run on bureaucratic momentum.
Kantor's Henry Wirz, the camp commandant hanged after the war, is drawn not as a monster but as a sick, limited man drowning in a task beyond anyone, which is its own kind of indictment.
It is 767 pages, unhurried and cumulative, with the research visible in every detail of ration, latrine and burial.
Best for readers who want the Civil War's darkest chapter at full length, in the old panoramic style, and who have the stomach for it.
Historical Context & Significance
Andersonville was published in October 1955, became a bestseller, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956. MacKinlay Kantor had been working toward it for roughly twenty five years, back to Long Remember, his 1934 Gettysburg novel, and he built it from the prisoner memoirs, John McElroy's account above all.
Kantor's own road there was pure American freelance: pulp fiction and Iowa newspapers in the twenties, then war correspondence in Europe, flying with the bomber crews and inside Buchenwald within days of its liberation, an experience that stands close behind this book's subject. His blank verse novel Glory for Me became William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, which took seven Academy Awards.
Schools assigned Andersonville for decades, banned it intermittently for its language, and largely moved on; the novel now holds its place as the standard fictional treatment of the prison, and its portrait of Wirz still frames the argument historians have about him.