The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) William Wyler, Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Virginia Mayo, & Fredric March

<b>Book Vs. Movie: The Best Years of Our Lives </b><br /><b>The MacKinlay Kantor Novel Vs. the 1946 Classic Film<br /><br /><br /></b>The Margos continue their journey through post-WW2 America with one of the most celebrated movies of the 20th Century--<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036868/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Best Years of Our Lives</a>. The film was based on the novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3971094-glory-for-me" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Glory for Me</a> by<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacKinlay_Kantor" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> MacKinlay Kantor</a>, who wrote the story of wounded GIs dealing with trauma in <a href="https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-blank-verse" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">blank verse</a> form. He started as a war correspondent in London and flew in some bombing missions. <br /><br />Glory for Me was an unglamorous look at what war makes people do to survive the experience and struggle to live a “normal” life afterward. He based his characters on real soldiers he had met while on his assignments and was passionate about telling the truth. Kantor eventually won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for <a href="https://www.nps.gov/ande/learn/historyculture/camp_sumter_history.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Andersonville</a>, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. <br /><br />He was unhappy with director <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wyler" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">William Wyler’s</a> take on his work which he felt was sanitized and disrespected actual war veterans. <br /><b><br /></b>Wyler had flown in combat missions over Europe on the Memphis Belle and had his ideas on how to tell the story he set in fictional Boone City. He hired top actors <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000763/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dana Andrew</a>s, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001485/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">My