The acclaimed author who was ‘simply Grandpa’
What most of us don’t know about our own families could fill a book. Chances are good, however, that very few people would be interested in reading anything we’d write.
That’s certainly not the case with Tom Shroder’s deeply rewarding The Most Famous Writer Who
Ever Lived (Blue Rider Press, 416 pp., out of four). Of course, most of us don’t have a grandfather like MacKinlay Kantor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Andersonville — considered one of the greatest Civil War novels ever written.
Kantor (who died in 1977 at age 73), a prodigious and celebrated writer with an oversize
personality, produced more than 30 novels and countless works of fiction in his lifetime, including
Glory for Me, the basis for William Wyler’s revered, 1946 Oscar winner The Best Years of Our Lives.
Kantor also hobnobbed with a stunning array of the rich, famous and brilliant, among them Grant Wood, Gregory Peck, Stephen Vincent Benét and James Cagney. He drank heavily with Ernest Hemingway, mentored crime novelist John D. MacDonald, appeared on television and in movies, “discovered” Oscarwinning actor and folk singer Burl Ives, and gained and lost small fortunes more than once.
It was Shroder’s mother who told the author that her father was “the most famous writer who ever lived.” But to the still young Shroder, “he was simply Grandpa.” And the Grandpa Shroder knew was, by that time, a pompous, out-of-favor, out-of-touch reactionary alcoholic.
Some decades later, however, the writer, editor and investigative journalist in Shroder found himself driven to discover more about “this man, who I had always loved, if not fully appreciated.”
Most amateur genealogists have little more than Google and Ancestory.com to go on. Shroder had the advantage of more than 150 boxes filled with more than 50,000 items providing documentation, photographs, hints, clues and evidence writ large about his grandfather’s life, sitting in the Library of Congress.
“Was it possible, forty years after his death,” Shroder wondered, “that I could get to know my grandfather, not as a teenager might remember a sometimes garrulous old man, but as a contemporary could come to know a living, breathing intimate?”
It’s the author’s reaction to what he finds that gives the book its deeper resonance, “a series of astonishing parallels between our lives that defied chance and made me see myself in a new light.”