The Killer Angels
The Classic Novel of the Civil War
By Michael Shaara
(Ballantine Books, Mass Market Paperback, 9780345348104, 384pp.)
Publication Date: August 12, 1987
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback, Hardcover
Categories: Historical - General, Literary, War & Military
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Winner of the Pultizer Prize
In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty were also the casualties of war. Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece is unique, sweeping, unforgettable—the dramatic story of the battleground for America’s destiny.
Michael Shaara was born in 1928 in Jersey City, New Jersey. After graduating from Rutgers University in 1951, he served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, was an amateur boxer, and a police officer. In 1960 he became a professor of creative writing at Florida State University, where he won a faculty-wide award for excellence in teaching. His writing career included the publication of some seventy short stories, beginning in the early 1950s in the heyday of science-fiction publications such as Astounding and Galaxy. Subsequent stories were published through the early 1970s in The Saturday Evening Post, Playboy, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and others. His first novel, The Broken Place, was published in 1968. Other novels include The Herald and For Love of the Game (published after his death).
Michael Shaara died in 1988 at the age of fifty-nine.
“My favorite historical novel . . . a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.”—James M. McPherson
“Remarkable . . . a book that changed my life . . . I had never visited Gettysburg, knew almost nothing about that battle before I read the book, but here it all came alive.”—Ken Burns
“Shaara carries [the reader] swiftly and dramatically to a climax as exciting as if it were being heard for the first time.”—The Seattle Times
“Utterly absorbing.”—Forbes
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