Scope and Content Note
The papers of MacKinlay Kantor (1904-1977) span the years 1885-1998, with the bulk of the items dated from 1920 to 1982. The collection is organized in five series: Family and Biographical File, Correspondence, Literary File, Addition, and Oversize.
Kantor's long and prolific literary career included Long Remember (1934), a novel about the battle of Gettysburg; Andersonville (1956), a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Civil War prison camp; Spirit Lake (1961), concerning an Indian massacre of settlers near the Iowa-Minnesota border in 1857; and Valley Forge (1975), written to commemorate the bicentennial of the American Revolution. These works and other books, stories, articles, plays, poetry, and early writing as a newspaper reporter in Iowa are well documented in the papers.
As Kantor donated his papers to the Library of Congress, he wrote descriptive lists of the items in each package he sent over a period of fifteen years. Items were numbered within the package and then listed by categories Kantor devised as a means of keeping track of what he had sent. Initially he had three categories: "Letters," "Miscellaneous Manuscripts," and "Assorted Material." Later he devised a fourth category, "Complete Exhibits," to encompass various types of material relating to the publication of literary works. Some of Kantor's detailed notes provide background information concerning the creation of a literary work or his relationship with a correspondent. Other notes simply identify the items. Eventually Kantor compiled his commentary into notebooks now in the Family and Biographical File. Although the items have been removed from Kantor's shipping packages, they can still be located with his descriptive lists. Items described by Kantor in the "Letters" notebook are now in the Correspondence series. Items described in the "Miscellaneous Manuscripts" and "Complete Exhibits" notebooks are in the Literary File. Items described in the "Assorted Material" notebooks are in the Family and Biographical File, Correspondence, or Literary File. Copies of Kantor's notes have been attached to many of these items; other items have a reference to the Kantor notebooks written on the document.
Although the Family and Biographical File also concerns Kantor's immediate family, most of the items in the series document his youth in Iowa, literary celebrity, and involvement as a writer with the military and with the police department in New York City. Family papers include correspondence of family members and writings by his mother, Effie McKinlay Kantor. The biographical file includes the four notebooks containing descriptive inventories of Kantor's papers at the Library of Congress and a consultancy file concerning Curtis LeMay's vice presidential campaign with George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election.
The Correspondence series primarily documents Kantor's literary career but also treats personal and social matters. Some of the correspondence is addressed jointly to Kantor and his wife, Irene Layne Kantor, and a few of her responses are also included. Early in his career, Kantor handled his own business arrangements with periodicals and newspapers, and much of his correspondence with them in the 1920s and 1930s is filed under "Magazine and newspaper editors." Until 1950, Kantor's books were published by the firm Coward-McCann, with Tim McCann as his editor. Correspondence concerning titles published by the firm is in files labelled "Coward-McCann," though the exchanges are primarily with McCann.
Prominent in the Correspondence series are letters to and from literary agents Ned Brown, Donald Friede, Paul Reynolds, Sydney Sanders, and H. N. Swanson. Kantor worked most frequently with Friede, and correspondence between them is extensive from 1940 until Friede's death in 1965. Friede was more than Kantor's literary agent; he was often his editor, publisher, confidant, and advisor. For instance, Friede's role as Kantor's personal agent and editor for Andersonville and Spirit Lake at World Publishing is documented in his correspondence with Kantor.
The Correspondence series also includes fan mail, introductory letters written in 1927 when Kantor considered moving to California for a newspaper job, decades of letters from boyhood friends such as Richard Whiteman, and files for Iowa and Sarasota, Florida, which was home base for the Kantors after 1938. There is also correspondence concerning United States Air Force personnel. As a war correspondent in World War II, Kantor concentrated on the air war in Europe after flying on combat missions first with the Royal Air Force and then with the Eighth and Ninth United States Air Forces, especially the 305th and 344th Bomb Groups. Kantor's articles drew the attention of commanding officers, and eventually he worked with Generals Carl Spaatz, Ira Eaker, and Curtis LeMay to write reports of the European air war. Correspondence concerning this work, later assignments, and his friendships is filed under "United States Air Force."
Also included among Kantor's correspondents are Stuart Cloete, Joseph Cotten, Will Crawford, Richard Glendenning, David Gray (1870-1968), Alden Hatch, Joseph Hayes, Ben Hibbs, Burl Ives, Alfred A. Knopf, Margaret Leech, Curtis LeMay, John D. MacDonald, Samson Raphaelson, Charles Robbins, Ben Stahl, Daniel Taradash, Frederic Van de Water, Henry A. Wallace, and Grant Wood. Additional correspondents include Franklin P. Adams, Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Vincent Benét, James Cagney, Bennett Cerf, Saxe Commins, Walter Damrosch, Paul Engle, José Ferrer, M. F. K. Fisher, Paul T. Gilbert, Lillian Gish, Charles Grayson, Ernest Hemingway, Daniel Longwell, Myrna Loy, John P. Marquand, Herbert R. Mayes, Clark R. Mollenhoff, Frank Luther Mott, Richard M. Nixon, Gregory Peck, Edward G. Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carl Sandburg, Rex Stout, and Rudy Vallée.
The Literary File in the Kantor Papers documents all aspects of his career, including his early work in journalism and poetry, short stories and novels, plays for screen and stage, and his nonfiction articles and books. Featured in addition to typewritten and handwritten drafts are research notes, correspondence, transcripts of interviews, and promotional and illustrative matter. Kantor learned to dictate initial drafts of his writings in the late 1930s and thereafter frequently used dictaphone machines including one installed in his automobile in the 1950s. The Dictabelt recordings accompanying his papers have been transferred to the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. Also included with Kantor's recordings is a set of interviews with Curtis LeMay, whose memoir, Mission With LeMay: My Story, as told to Kantor, is in the Literary File along with partial transcripts of interviews and other background information that Kantor collected while writing the air force general's “autobiography.”
The Literary File also contains material relating to Kantor's own memoirs, But Look, The Morn (1947), Lobo (1957), and I Love You, Irene (1972). The Prose subseries includes the novellas, stories, and sketches he wrote for popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, McClure's,and Real Detective Talesto hone his narrative skills in the 1920s and 1930s. Stage and screen writings include finished and unfinished ideas and projects, most notably the screenplay suggested by Samuel Goldwyn as an adaptation of Kantor's novel, Glory for Me, a book about returning veterans of World War II. The Academy Award-winning motion picture entitled The Best Years of Our Lives, however, was produced in 1946 from the screenplay by Robert Sherwood rather than from Kantor's own adaptation of his work.
The Addition complements the original portion of the collection and includes material relating to Kantor's family and personal life as well as his literary career. It consists chiefly of correspondence, as well as diaries, drafts and galleys of Kantor's literary work, notes, financial documents, clippings, printed material, publicity and promotional material, photographs, and other family papers. Much of the correspondence in the addition is family correspondence addressed to Kantor's wife, Irene Layne Kantor, or jointly to her and her husband, and is written by friends and family members. The addition also contains personal correspondence between MacKinlay Kantor and Irene, as well as business and general correspondence regarding Kantor's work. Materials of particular interest in the addition include a draft of the screenplay for Andersonville written by Daniel Taradash, as well as a draft of Kantor's 1958 novel Strange Day, which was published in two parts in The Australian Women's Weekly.
Writings in the collection include numerous unpublished works. Since Kantor frequently reworked his pieces, particularly the unpublished ones, in order to use a short story or sketch as the basis for a screenplay or proposed film, some narrative stories have been placed in the drama section of the Literary File as the last incarnation of the particular work. The writings files are fairly complete with the exception of his draft of Andersonville, which Kantor donated to the State University of Iowa Library in Iowa City, Iowa, before he began sending his papers to the Library of Congress.
Kantor often typed on both sides of a page. The first draft typed on one side of the paper would later be used for subsequent drafts as well or for carbon copies of his correspondence. Photocopies of these letters have been placed in the Correspondence file. When a draft or partial draft of one work is preserved on the reverse side of a draft for a different title, a cross-reference sheet has been placed in the file alerting readers to both titles.