Spirit Lake — Mackinlay Kantor

MACKINLAY KANTORPulitzer Prize-winning author of AndersonvilleVast in scope, breath-taking in intensity, Spirit Lake is the truly great novel of the American frontier. 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.