Andersonville
by MacKinlay Kantor
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At a glance:
- Author: MacKinlay Kantor
- First Published: 1955
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Historical realism and war fiction
- Setting: Camp Sumter, Georgia
- Characters: Ira Claffey, Lucy Claffey, Veronica Claffey, Harry Elkins, Henry Wirz, Nathan Dreyfoos, Coral Tebbs
- Genres: Long fiction, Realism, Historical fiction, War fiction
- Subjects: North America or North Americans, Power, personal or social, Prisons, Escapes, Nineteenth century, Doctors, Despair, Violence, Civil War, War, Death or dying, Idealism, Cruelty, Soldiers, Life and death, Diseases, Prisoners of war, Horror, Hunger, Starvation, Evil, Survival
- Locales: South (U.S.), United States, Georgia, North America
The Story:
In mid-autumn, 1863, Confederate army surveyors arrive near the southern Georgia plantation of Ira Claffey to begin construction of a military prison camp. Claffey is told that the facility, planned to encompass about twenty-seven acres, will house ten thousand prisoners of war. There will be no barracks, only an open enclosure bound by a series of fences.
Amid the chaos of the closing months of the American Civil War, the camp swells to close to fifty thousand prisoners. Quickly, as cattle cars of captured Union army soldiers keep arriving, conditions in the...
(The entire page is 2214 words.)
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