MACKINLAY KANTOR Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Andersonville VALLEY FORGE Poignant, tender, and powerful, VALLEY FORGE brings into sharp new focus one of the most tensely dramatic episodes of the American Revolution. With warmth and wit, compassion and sensitivity, MacKinlay Kantor evokes the flavor, pulse and texture of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, transporting the reader into the houses and workshops, kitchens and stables, parlors and bedrooms of ordinary citizens. Here are not only the soldiers of Valley Forge, but the panorama of the Revolution itself. George Washington, lamenting the remoteness and lack of valor in the Congress, anticipating new battle; the sprightly, good-humored Martha, always loyal and loving to a fault; the Marquis de Lafayette, whose poise and dignity belied his youth; Baron von Steuben whose halting English made the soldiers laugh, but whose fierce devotion won their respect. And the multitude-young Mum, a sixteen-year-old deserter savagely trampled by Tarleton's Raiders; Malachi Lennan whose gift of a horse gained him entry into Mad Anthony Wayne's Drovers; Billy, the turncoat, wailing for his mother as he was dragged to the gallows. Sons of farmers and tradesmen, trappers and teachers-some too young to fight, and some too old-surge through these pages, giving life, breath, scope and humanity to the American Revolution and the winter at Valley Forge. MacKINLAY KANTOR was born in Webster City, Iowa in 1904. He began to write seriously at sixteen, became a newspaper reporter at seventeen, and an author at twenty-three. Since his first-published novel in 1928, more than forty books have appeared in print, including verse, short stories, novellas, histories, and books for children. His best-selling, and Pulitzer Prize- winning Andersonville was published in 1955. MacKinlay Kantor's other than book accomplishments range from Hollywood screenwriting to police patrolling (N. Y. P. D.), to combat experience (RAF and U.SAF) in two wars. VALLEY FORGE is grandly conceived, but the quality is equal to the concept. The climate of the war, its taste and smell and the harsh texture of its life, are evoked with mystery. Neither souped-up nor toned-down under fashionable pressures, this is an extraordinarily honest and human book. I am greatly impressed.-MARY RENAULT

In The Children Sing MacKinlay Kantor-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Andersonville-ventures into the field of the parading mural, taking a colorful group of people through Eastern Asia into a crucible of challenge and excitement. Don Lundin and his wife, July, are in Bangkok with other members of Graduate Tours Incorporated. Lundin, a wealthy land speculator, had served with the U.S. Air Force in the bombing of Japan and also during the Korean War. He has harbored within himself an abusive hatred for the scrambling millions of the brown and yellow nations who are, to him, a disquieting threat. Despite the gentle example of Mr. Wye Rabarti Wong, a tour conductor who tends his flock with saintly fortitude, and Lundin's rescue of a drowning child in Thailand, his prejudice persists. Meanwhile, his beautiful July meets in Singapore an officer who has long been seeking an opportunity to demonstrate his passion for her-and they meet again in a Kowloon hotel. Perhaps Chaucer was not the first writer to present a group of people on a pilgrimage, but resourceful authors have been gathering their throngs together in such pageantry ever since Chaucer's time. The results, as far as MacKinlay Kantor is concerned, add up to a charming and memorable novel. The retired surgeon and his veteran actress wife; a quavering spinster clinging to false and profitless recollections; a quiet woman filled with death-dealing hatred for her bullying husband; the brave old Jew whose heart and soul are set on an intimate view of Mount Fuji-no-Yama; and the sign manufacturer drinking his life away even while he crouches at the Red Chinese border-we come to know these travelers and others intimately before we return to Japan with Don Lundin and see him overwhelmed by a startling revelation of his own past and a kinship with the East affirmed in the very flesh.