MacKinlay Kantor wrote Andersonville, the 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Civil War prison camp.
Published in 1955, Andersonville fictionalizes life at the Confederate prison camp in Georgia, where Union prisoners suffered extreme overcrowding, disease, hunger, and inadequate shelter. The novel uses multiple viewpoints to portray prisoners, guards, civilians, and officials rather than focusing on one hero alone.
The camp was officially known as Camp Sumter, but Andersonville became its common name because of its location near the town of Andersonville. The historical prison is now preserved as the Andersonville National Historic Site, which also includes the National Prisoner of War Museum.
The book is sometimes mistaken for The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer-winning Civil War novel about Gettysburg. Andersonville instead centers on imprisonment and the wartime systems that produced the camp’s horrors.