Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
Published 1956 · 767 pages · 191,750 words · about 21 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, War Fiction
How hard is Andersonville to read?
Andersonville scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Civil War vocabulary, period American prose.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Long sentences depicting prison camp horror.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions of humanity and evil through historical detail.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense with Civil War prison camp detail.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Multiple perspectives on same atrocity.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The prison camp becomes symbol of war's horror.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Kantor presents without editorializing.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- Historical resolution is known.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Multiple storylines across prison camp.
How Andersonville is regarded
Andersonville holds a literary regard score of 62 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.