Happy birthday, writer MacKinlay Kantor

It is the birthday of writer MacKinlay Kantor (1904), whose novel Andersonville (1955) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956. The book tells the story of a Confederate prisoner of war camp in Georgia during the Civil War. Kantor gleaned the stories of real characters from prisoner memoirs. He also created fictional characters to help tell the story of the camp and its inhumane conditions. During the early 1930s, Kantor wrote for pulp magazines such as Real Detective Tales, Mystery Stories, and Detective Fiction Weekly. Later, his work appeared in Collier’s and other slick magazines. He wrote more than 30 novels, also nonfiction books and children’s books, including Angleworms on Toast (1942), which was illustrated by Kurt Wiese. Kantor also wrote screenplays for several movies.