MACKINLAY KANTOR

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Andersonville

GLORY FOR ME

A Novel in Verse

By MacKinlay Kantor

BASIS FOR THE MOVIE

THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

It is seldom in time of war that an author, no matter how emotionally aware of what it all means, can write a book which expresses the feeling that motivates fighting men. Why did it happen this way, why is it ending this way- what are we now that it is done with, now that we are home? Indeed, are we home, or are we in a boarding-house of confusion and wretchedly defeated purposes and understandings?

MacKinlay Kantor is one of America’s best-known novelists. It might be said that if any author could write that book Kantor would be the one for the job, but it takes more than mere professional writing skill to achieve such a major accomplishment. It takes awareness born of action and danger and keenly felt knowledge. Such knowledge MacKinlay Kantor has found, and in his novel of war and its men, Glory for Me, he has wholly expressed it.

Well above the draft age, and physically unacceptable to the armed forces, Kantor intensely felt the need to join his younger fellows in some way; in some way he had to be a part of the danger, the horror, the glory of this war. He found his opportunity as a war correspondent. As such, based in England, he flew in combat with the U. S. Air Forces and the R.A.F. over enemy territory into flak and fire. As such he learned to know the fighting men whose constant companion, friend and fellow-in-war he was for many months. For the equivalent of a leave Kantor came back to the United States, and what filled his mind and his heart and his thoughts had to find expression in a book, which is Glory for Me.

Glory for Me is a simple novel-about three service men, honorably discharged for medical causes, who return home to the same town where in peacetime they had not known one another. Now they know one another, and through them we know them and their town and our country and war and peace and man.

Glory for Me is a national epic, told in language of the common man, in language of the poet: told as only an American could tell it.