Andersonville / MacKinlay Kantor.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1956.
"The greatest of our Civil War novels" -- The New York Times

I chose Andersonville at the library to learn more of the history of the American Civil War. The book didn't disappoint, because I just loved this phenomenal, epic novel, and the farther I got into it, the better I liked it. I was very touched by characters and events in the book and I found the book very moving, especially at its conclusion. I really liked the way that the author depicted the characters so vividly, as human beings with integrity or evil (or a mixture of both), whether from the North or South. There are no quotation marks around any of the dialogue in the novel, but I found that it wasn't distracting after the first couple of pages.

Many KTers will already know about Andersonville (Camp Sumter), a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia that held captured Union soldiers during the Civil War. The stockade was constructed with no shelter, furniture, supplies or equipment of any kind for the prisoners, except what they themselves brought -- and then often had stolen from them. Many thousands were confined there under horrific conditions, and many thousands died gruesome deaths. Andersonville is now a National Historic Site.

The writing in this book is beautiful. One prisoner reflects, "The great lamentation of the future will be concerned only with the fact that, by and large, the most energetic and high-minded youths of all these States involved were the ones who perished; and most of them were too young to leave their seed behind them. It will be a long weakness for the united Nation of the future."

From the book's cover: "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 twenty-five years in the making, MacKinlay Kantor's bestselling 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-by-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."

Here is a link that might be useful: Andersonville National Historic Site, Georgia