Spirit Lake

MACKINLAY KANTOR


Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Andersonville



Vast in scope, breath-taking in inten­sity, forged in prose both muscular and lyrical, Spirit Lake is the truly great novel of the American frontier.



It is a hundred stories in one: the story of emigrant and immigrant, the outlaw's story, the little girl's story, the murderer's story—the story of the dedicated young surgeon, hog-breeder, poetess, religious exhorter—of the Indian woman who harvests her crops in the midst of simmering violence.



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.



A novel by MacKinlay Kantor


Author of Arouse and Beware and Glory for Me