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

The fact that there are nine other counties named Hamilton in these United States besides the one in Iowa where MacKinlay Kantor was born simply provides a frame for this many-dimensioned, nostalgic portrait of an American way of life which some think is rapidly disappearing. Tim Kantor's photographs from all ten counties provide stunning evidence that certain truths, worth preserving, are still to be found. Ranging as far northeast as the Adirondacks, as far west as the Texas plains, as far south as Florida, and into six neighboring mid-western states, the Hamilton counties form a cross section of the America MacKinlay Kantor knows well. They provide scenes and subjects which call upon his richest veins of memory and imagination. A sweeping mid-western landscape, for example, recalls the voices of pioneers which even the trail of a jet stream in the sky does not diminish. An old lady sitting alone on her porch brings to mind the mysterious Miss Hattie and her antic poltergeist; sturdy farm scenes inspire a moving story of a man's love for his land. Eight new short stories of American life by the prize-winning novelist, sketches, anecdotes, reportage, historical summation and more than one hundred eloquent photographs move together through these pages to make Mamilton County a beautiful and unique book.