”They kept on insistin’ they wasn’t fightin’ for no slaves, they were fightin’ for their ‘rats.’ It finally dawned on me that what the feller meant was their ‘rights,’ only, the way they talk, it came out ‘rats.’. ( a mad thought that doesn’t last long) So the North was preserving the Union and freeing the slaves, but what exactly where the boys in butternut fighting for. With every click I have come one step closer to understanding everything. I love those moments when I read something, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that another tumbler has clicked into place.

It was one of many times while reading this book that Michael Shaara crystallized some thoughts for me. I hadn’t really thought about how unusual it is in the history of the world for men to be fighting for the freedom of others. You can see the famous fishhook deployment of the Union troops in blue. 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.

The killer angels novel