was born on this date in 1904. According to the Writer’s Almanac
[Kantor] first became interested in the war when he was ten years old, after a salesman left some sample pages of a Civil War encyclopedia in his parents’ house. He later discovered that his great-grandfather was an officer in the Union Army, and one of his aunts was a friend of Ulysses S. Grant. As a teenager, Kantor marched with the Grand Army of the Republic in Memorial Day parades and became an expert fife player. He spent more than 25 years researching his novel Andersonville (1955), about the Confederate prison camp where 50,000 Union soldiers were held. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956.