Long, long ago, back in 1960 or so, I was a teenager just starting to read adult books and magazines. One night after dinner, I picked up the new edition of Look magazine, easily found in most middle-class homes of the era, and there was a story with an intriguing title: “If the South Had Won the Civil War.”

The author, a man named MacKinlay Kantor, lays out an amazing tale, an alternate history of the way things might have gone. In his version, Ulysses S. Grant is killed just before the Battle of Vicksburg after falling off his horse, which leads to a debacle at Gettysburg. The South invades Washington, Lincoln is arrested and a truce is quickly reached. The South is recognized as a sovereign nation. Kantor goes on to detail the next 100 years of history. The Confederacy annexes Cuba, then abolishes slavery. Alaska remains in Russian hands and as the Cold War gets colder, the Union and the Confederacy reconcile and in 1961, they reunite.

I was fascinated by the way the author put things together. Was it fiction? Was it just a big joke? Whatever it was, it made an enormous impression on me. I knew then and there that’s what I wanted to do: make up crazy stories and do it so well that they actually seemed believable. Just like this Kantor guy.

Many years later, I moved to Sarasota. I actually had become a writer. And much to my surprise, I encountered Kantor once again. This was where he had lived for the last 40 years of his life. It was 1985, and he had already been dead 10 years, but he was still a presence. I got to know more about him, became friends with his son and his aging contemporaries, and discovered that this almost-forgotten writer’s fingerprints are not just all over my career, but all over Sarasota and, indeed, all over American culture.

Mack (the nickname he preferred) was the most famous person in Sarasota back in the 1950s. He was a prime example of that now-defunct breed, the macho, hard drinking, womanizing literary giant whose most prominent example was Ernest Hemingway. In fact, Mack and Hemingway were drinking buddies. Hemingway even came to Sarasota and visited Mack at his home on Siesta Key in 1960. As local lore goes, Mack took him to lunch at the Golden Buddha, the Chinese restaurant on the North Trail. It was an event the Golden Buddha boasted about for years.

The two men had a lot to talk about. They were at the height of their fame. Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; Kantor won it in 1956. Both had Midwest backgrounds that could be seen in their work. War was a big theme, too. Women weren’t very important in the scheme of things; they wrote about the deeds of men.

Yet today Hemingway is celebrated as an immortal icon of American literature and Kantor is barely remembered. What happened?

If anyone was ever born to be a writer, it was Mack. He had been doing it professionally since he was 17, first for the newspaper in his hometown of Webster City, Iowa, and then in Chicago and New York. He could write anything—and did. Journalism, short stories, crime novels, screenplays, sentimental books about dogs, even children’s books.

He had a lonely childhood. He hated his father, a swindler and con man who served time in Sing Sing. His mother, a newspaper editor, was the main focus of his life, and the local library was his hangout, the place he would escape from a world he didn’t quite fit into. He would later recall time spent there as his “university.” He was teased as being the “town poet.”

Mack’s writing talent showed early, and by 17 he was making money at it. It was the golden age of American writing—and reading. Many people read novels in the evening as their main focus of entertainment. Some of these great novels of the ’50s have gone on to become classics; others have faded from view. But all of them were part of a flourishing publishing industry that included not just books but magazines of all sorts, from the prestigious The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire to the more nitty-gritty world of pulp fiction. For writers, all this meant an enormous number of outlets that needed content, and Mack’s versatility was a big plus.

His apprentice years included much newspaper work, then the famous true crime genre: Dime Detective, Amazing Stories, Mystery Magazine. His first novel combined these elements into a book called Diversey, about the Chicago underworld. It was a success but not a hit. But he had a growing reputation, and he was on his way. He married Irene Layne and they had two children, a boy named Tim and a girl named Layne.

Mack had always been fascinated by the Civil War. There were still veterans alive when he was growing up, and he was always listening to their stories. His great uncle was one such veteran. He lost an arm in combat. Mack drew upon these stories for his 1934 novel about Gettysburg entitled Long Remember.

The book, about a soldier with pacifist tendencies caught up in the horror of battle, got good reviews and was taken up by all the book clubs. Suddenly, in the height of the Depression, Mack was making (in today’s money) $800,000 a year. He was now playing in the big leagues.

The Kantors did what a lot of people who just came into money do—they moved to Sarasota. In those days, it was considered beautiful, remote and undeveloped. Mack and Irene built a house on Shell Road on Siesta Key in 1937. “It was low and sprawling,” his son Tim remembered, “with whitewashed walls of pecky cypress and lots of windows.” Set on three acres right on the beach, with wild tropical vegetation, it was an idyllic place to grow up. Tim and Layne were enrolled in the nearby Out-of-Door Academy. The new house, and the new town, suited Mack so perfectly that he spent the rest of his life here.

But Mack’s insatiable ambition meant he was always off somewhere, doing research and making deals. The family moved to Beverly Hills for a while and then took a sojourn in New York and another in Spain as he began working on screenplays. The movies that bore his name in the credits—both those adapted from his work and those he wrote from scratch—are, for the most part, not long remembered, like the films The Man from Dakota with Wallace Beery and Dolores Del Rio; Happy Land with Don Ameche and Natalie Wood, at age five, in her first movie role; and a hillbilly musical, Mountain Music, starring Martha Raye, famous for her enormous mouth. But they brought in money and Hollywood connections. Mack wanted more, though. Something “serious.”

Then came World War II. It was a transformative event for the great macho writers of the time: Norman Mailer, James Jones and Robert Ruark all wrote the combat novels that cemented their reputations. Mack’s war experience was serving as a correspondent for The Saturday Evening Post. He flew on several bombing missions, of which he was very proud. But he always put a special focus on the average soldier and what he was going through.

Then he saw Buchenwald, the notorious German Nazi concentration camp. He was with the Allies in April 1945 when the camp was liberated. He saw firsthand the bodies piled up, the crematories, the starved, empty-eyed survivors, the vomit, the filth. Suddenly everything—his childhood memories, his great uncle’s missing arm, his considerable talent and his insatiable ambition—all fell into place. He was ready to write his masterpiece.

Andersonville was published in October 1955 and immediately became a classic. Today it is still considered one of the top two or three Civil War novels, its main competition being Gone with the Wind. It tells the story of the prisoner of war camp hastily built by the Confederacy in southeast Georgia—26 acres surrounded by 15-foot-high fencing, with no real buildings, where 45,000 Union prisoners were held and where 13,000 of them died, under circumstances so brutal that its commander, the infamous Henry Wirz, was executed by the Union for war crimes.

Mack’s novel is almost 800 pages long. It is dense with detail and has far too many characters and no real hero to follow. It is gruesome in the extreme, full of dying men, dead bodies, prisoners getting shot, despair, etc. It’s always been controversial and has even been banned in certain places, as a matter of taste and propriety.

But it’s one of those unpleasant things that ends up sanctifying you. It can be tough going but it makes you a better person. And the book certainly struck a chord; it was at the top of every best-seller list for a year and a half and made millions for Mack. The Pulitzer Prize was awarded. “Unanimously,” Mack would brag. He totally believed in his talent. “There hasn’t been anything remotely resembling it in the annals of American historical fiction,” he wrote to his publisher. “You have to go back to War and Peace for comparison.”

Andersonville’s success turned Mack into a celebrity. He did ads for Calvert Whiskey and Zippo lighters. Back home in Sarasota, he reveled in his role as the town’s most famous citizen. He drove a canary yellow Lincoln Continental with a special cupholder for a cocktail. He and Irene hired modernist architect Ralph Twitchell to double the size of their house. He even appeared in a movie, Wind Across the Everglades, alongside Christopher Plummer and Peter Falk.

Tim once said that his father loved to “preside and perform.” He was a famous ham, needing no coaxing to get out his guitar and sings songs he had written himself. The most famous was “How I Hate the Tourists!” sung to the tune of  “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Mack’s years in Hollywood had made him many friends and they all came to visit. He discovered a folk singer named Burl Ives and was influential in making him a star. Gregory Peck would show up, then Carl Sandburg, then Nicholas Ray. He started a weekly luncheon group of writers—all men—who met every Friday at the Plaza Restaurant downtown near Five Points for a game of Liar’s Poker and some alcohol-induced hilarity.

The letters he wrote to the local paper became famous. He would chide the town about all sorts of things. Some were trivial, but in 1957, when Sarasota was debating the idea of designating a local beach for Black residents (so segregated was Sarasota back in those days that the idea of an integrated beach never even came up), he wrote a letter threatening to write a national article to expose the town’s cruelty toward its Black children. On a public level, Mack was relatively enlightened for the time; he treated his Black characters respectfully and even wrote The Saturday Evening Post’s first story with a sympathetic Black hero. In private, though, there was a much different side. As Tim once put it, “He smelled as much of prejudice as he did of his pipes and his favorite hair tonic.”

He was also beginning to smell of alcohol. Mack had always been a drinker, but after the success of Andersonville and the realization that he had to do it all over again—only this time with so much more to lose—the drinking got worse. He would become loud, blustery and demanding. There were ugly public scenes. His womanizing was becoming more of a problem, too. There were many “babes,” as he called them. Tim made a list of his type: “rich girl, poor girl, star and starlet, singer, secretary, family friend or wife of friend.” The long-suffering Irene learned to put up with it. One girlfriend, Peggy Pulitzer (ironically, a member of that Pulitzer Prize family), became like a second wife.

The success he worked so hard for was becoming his enemy. Literature was changing. New writers were appearing who wrote much differently, with more contemporary points of view: James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, even Jacqueline Susann. Historical sagas of America’s past stopped selling. Yet Mack kept writing them, still living an expensive lifestyle with limos and first class travel, the best food and wine.

He came up with a plan. He would do it again. He had the perfect subject matter, the Spirit Lake Massacre, which took place in 1857 in Northwest Iowa. A renegade tribe of Native Americans massacred white settlers, taking three of the women as captives. Mack knew the area and the mindset of the people, with many stories of the old days still in his head. And he knew what the book’s success just might mean. The Nobel Prize. Hemingway got one. Faulkner got one. Maybe it was his turn.

The result, Spirit Lake, came out in 1961. At 1,000 pages, it outdid Andersonville in length, and, like Andersonville, was a mosaic-like view of the situation, with a vast assortment of characters, all of whose backgrounds and surroundings are described in detail. (Seventy pages of the book take place in France.) Granted, Mack’s descriptions of frontier America are meticulously researched and accurate, but as one critic put it, “Kantor can’t let one of his protagonists ride past a tree without devoting half a page to describing the tree and its surroundings.”

Reviews were respectful, but the public was no longer interested. There were several more books, but they were even less successful. The money was disappearing, and the Siesta Key home had to be mortgaged. Mack’s excessive lifestyle—he seemed to live on vodka and vichyssoises—was catching up with him, and he developed heart trouble. By the summer of 1977, he was dying. His grandson Tom Shroder, Layne’s son and a writer himself, went to visit him at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. “Tethered to a web of tubes, he looked like one of the inmates of Andersonville he’d written about—tortured, starved, barely alive,” Tom wrote. As he tried to comfort his grandfather, the old man turned to him and said his last words: “Horrible…horrible.”   

Today, MacKinlay Kantor is remembered as a minor footnote in American literature. Some of the writers he considered his competition—Hemingway, Nabokov, Steinback—have stood the test of time and are now part of the canon. Mack’s place remains with the others, the lesser talents, names that no one recognizes anymore: Leon Uris, Thomas B. Costain, Irving Stone.

Which is a shame, because he was a remarkable writer. Andersonville remains a Civil War classic to this day. It is not widely read due to its intimidating length and depressing subject matter, but it still commands a great deal of respect.

Yet when you dig a little deeper, you find that Mack was much more important than literary scholars give him credit for. His influence still exists today, in ways both well-known and hard to see. Take the famous 1946 movie, The Best Years of Our Lives. The story of G.I.s returning home after World War II (the same plot as Homer’s Odyssey) is a Memorial Day perennial and set the stage for a new national concern and respect for the well-being of soldiers returning from war.

It began life as one of Mack’s novels, entitled Glory for Me. Written in blank verse and showcasing Mack’s skill as a writer, it is famous for its goosebump-inducing opening line, “Frank Derry, 21, and killer of a hundred men...” Producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights, changed the title, and hired Robert Sherwood to write the screenplay. The result won seven Academy Awards and made more money than any movie since Gone with the Wind.

Sherwood made many changes to Mack’s novel, but it remains his story, with its emotional impact effectively transferred to the screen. Mack was upset by one thing, though. The credits read “Based on a novel by MacKinlay Kantor.” The title of Mack’s novel isn’t even mentioned. It was a slight that bothered him for the rest of his life.

If The Best Years of Our Lives shows Mack’s ability to connect with the American public, another of his films brought him belated recognition for entirely different reasons. It began with a story called Gun Crazy, which Mack wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in 1940. The rights were bought by a poverty row studio famous for its trashy crime pictures. The studio also hired Mack to write the screenplay. It’s about the doomed romance of two beautiful young people who turn to crime and go on a spree.

This was before Mack became famous, and he had no problem being associated with such a low-end project. But writing the script was harder than he thought, and the producers hired another writer to do re-writes. The other writer was Dalton Trumbo.

Trumbo, the legendary screenwriter of Spartacus and many other classics, had been in prison for refusing to cooperate with a congressional committee investigating suspected communists. He was blacklisted but found ways around this by channeling his fee through friends. Exactly what is Kantor’s and what is Trumbo’s remains a little murky, but one thing is clear. They created one of the most influential films ever; released in 1950, it’s on Time Magazine’s Top 100 list and considered the archetypal film noir. TCM’s Eddie Mueller has written an entire book about it. As if that isn’t enough, it is generally considered the film that sparked the French New Wave.

And then there is the reason I first encountered him: his influence on other writers, me included. “If the South Had Won the Civil War” gave birth to a whole new genre called “alternate history.” From a stylistic point of view, his most prominent pupil is Cormac McCarthy, who is the first to admit that he adopted Mack’s eccentric punctuation (no quotation marks) and his dystopian world-view in his literary classic The Road.

But in Sarasota, the town he once presided over and performed to, he is all but forgotten. The house on Shell Road has long since been torn down and replaced with three or four mansions. Both his children have passed away. Son Tim wrote a wonderful book called My Father’s Voice, a memoir of life with his father. I was flattered when Tim asked me to write a blurb for the back cover. I did so and praised the book highly. I still do.

Mack’s grandson, Tom Shroder, has also written a memoir. It’s called The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family, and it deals with
the perils of fame. Also excellent. But a full-scale retelling of Mack’s dramatic life from an outsider has yet to happen.

At the Sarasota County History Center archives, there used to be a recreation of Mack’s office. It had his desk, his military souvenirs, magazine covers that featured him, knickknacks from his travels—everything but the view out to the Gulf. But the archives are being relocated to a new building. Will it have Mack’s office on display? The county isn’t saying, but somehow, I don’t think so. No one is interested anymore.

The Golden Buddha is still there, sort of. It became Sai Woo, then Barnacle Bill’s, with its famous minaret transformed into a version of a lighthouse. These days it’s empty and surrounded by a chain link fence, a sad, silent reminder of the afternoon Ernest Hemingway had lunch there, guest of the most famous writer nobody has ever heard of.

Robert Plunket’s two novels, My Search for Warren Harding and Love Junkie, were recently republished by New Directions (U.S.) and Penguin Modern Classics (U.K.).