The position of all the troops on July 3rd, 1863. We’re an army going out to set other men free.” I don’t … this hasn’t happened much in the history of the world. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. If you look at history you’ll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. Today there is a Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction, established by Jeffrey Shaara, awarded yearly at Gettysburg College. Jeffrey was the one to finally get Michael's last book, For Love of the Game, published three years after he died. His most famous is the prequel to The Killer Angels, Gods and Generals. Shaara's son, Jeffrey Shaara, is also a popular writer of historical fiction most notably sequels to his father's best-known novel.

Shaara died of another heart attack in 1988. His novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. The stress of this and his smoking caused him to have a heart attack at the early age of 36 from which he fully recovered. He later taught literature at Florida State University while continuing to write fiction. He was born to Italian immigrant parents (the family name was originally spelled Sciarra, which in Italian is pronounced the same way) in Jersey City, New Jersey, graduated from Rutgers University in 1951, and served as a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne division prior to the Korean War.īefore Shaara began selling science fiction stories to fiction magazines in the 1950s, he was an amateur boxer and police officer. Michael Shaara was an American writer of science fiction, sports fiction, and historical fiction.

Civil war the killer angels