A Man Who Had No Eyes

MacKinlay Kantor was born in 1904 and started writing in the early 1920s. He became known for his historical novels set against the backdrops of the American Civil War and World War II. His novel Andersonville (1955), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956, is his most famous Civil War novel. Kantor’s novel Glory for Me (1945) was based on his Word War II experiences and written in blank verse. It was adapted into the movie The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and won several Academy Awards.

The short story “A Man Who Had No Eyes,” published in 1931, belongs to Kantor’s early series of fiction, which his journalistic writings heavily influenced. As a young man, Kantor used to report for The Webster City Daily News and write columns for The Des Moines Tribune. Between the years 1928 and 1934, Kantor produced innumerable pulp short stories, mostly detective and horror fiction, that were published in popular magazines such as Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories. These stories were characterized by brisk action, tight plotlines, suspense, and surprise endings. In this context, “A Man Who Had No Eyes”—with its terse language and clever use of

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