
MACKINLAY KANTOR Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Andersonville Vast in scope, breath-taking in intensity, forged in prose both muscular and lyrical, Spirit Lake is the truly great novel of the American frontier. It is a hundred stories in one: the story of emigrant and immigrant, the outlaw's story, the little girl's story, the murderer's story—the story of the dedicated young surgeon, hog-breeder, poetess, religious exhorter—of the Indian woman who harvests her crops in the midst of simmering violence. Within these pages swarm the men, women, and children who, in the 1850s, plunged from New England, the Ohio Valley, or the central crowded East to wide Iowa country, led in passion by their dream. They came to make new homes. Nor did they move against an anonymous foe. In this mighty book the American Indian rises in full-fledged reality to make the reader conversant at last with the Indian manner and heart. Spirit Lake is as much the saga of those who resisted, as it is of those who came to take the land. The prayer is here, so is the massacre. The rape is here, the dove and meadowlark, the blizzard, the fragility of love, the roaring laughter by day, and tears in the night. High over all, above Dakota war chant and rumbling wagon wheels, rises a choral hymn to the eternal dream which will not be put down—which will resound as long as there are Americans to sing it. It is as if the entire lifetime of MacKinlay Kantor has been but a preparation for this gigantic novel of the American frontier. By nativity, inheritance, inclination, and experience, he is peculiarly fitted to recite the joys and perils of homeseekers who went, trudging and driving, into beautiful dangerous prairie regions of the Middle West more than a century ago. Born and reared in the home of pioneer grandparents, MacKinlay Kantor absorbed the excitement, the illusion and hazard of Spirit Lake settlers within his earliest awareness. His first published work dealt with his native prairies—and that was forty years ago. With his penetrating but sympathetic observation of Americans as they lived in peace or as they died in battle, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist reaches in Spirit Lake the climax of four decades filled with literary achievement. The son of the pioneers has given us the frontier. A novel by MacKinlay Kantor Author of Arouse and Beware and Glory for Me
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.