Michael Shaara

Michael Shaara was born to an Italian immigrant and World War I POW father and a mother descended from Revolutionary War patriots. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1951 and served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. A decorated amateur boxer, Shaara also worked as a police officer in St. Petersburg, Florida, before becoming a professor of creative writing at Florida State University. Over the course of his career, he published more than 70 short stories, many of them science fiction, and several novels, including For Love of the Game, a story about a baseball legend. He suffered a serious Vespa accident while teaching in Florence, Italy, which left him unconscious for five weeks and dealing with health repercussions for many years. Shaara based The Killer Angels on the recollections of generals and ordinary soldiers instead of on scholarly interpretations of the Civil War. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Killer Angels in 1975. He died of a heart attack at age 59. After Shaara’s death, his son, Jeff Shaara, wrote a prequel to The Killer Angels, Gods and Generals (1996) as well as a sequel, The Last Full Measure (1998).