1975 Pulitzer Prize Review: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

“This is the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, told from the viewpoints of Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet and some of the other men who fought there” -Michael Shaara

Like Stephen Crane before him, Michael Shaara (pronounced “Share-uh”) wrote The Killer Angels because he wanted to deeply experience what it was like to be on the battlefield during the American Civil War. The novel offers a tense account of the Battle of Gettysburg, and it presents the critical battle from several different perspectives. It is, perhaps, one of the top five genre-defining works of historical fiction. Shaara, who initially cut his teeth writing pulp science fiction stories, took an entirely different turn when he penned The Killer Angels. After much research and a 1964 family visit to the Gettysburg National Monument, Shaara finished writing the book toward the end of the Vietnam War era, and by all accounts it was quite an ordeal getting the book onto shelves. For starters, he suffered a heart attack while writing the manuscript and it was rejected by no less than 15 publishers before at last the David McKay Company accepted it (David McKay was previously known for publishing the comic book stories of “Blondie,” “Dick Tracy,” and “Popeye” before it was acquired by Random House in 1973 –one year prior to the publication of The Killer Angels). Unfortunately, it did not sell particularly well even after it won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and tragically, Michael Shaara died in 1988, five years before his novel would experience a surprising renaissance after it was adapted into the Hollywood film Gettysburg (1993). As its popularity continued to rise, I was interested to learn that The Killer Angels has often been required reading at various U.S. military colleges, and apparently it is one of only two novels (the other being Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer) featured on the U.S. Army’s recommended reading list for Officer Professional Development.

Today, The Killer Angels is often hailed by Civil War buffs as a masterpiece and, in many respects, I have to agree. This is a truly superlative novel that brings a sense of urgency and immediacy to the experience of the Civil War –it masterfully confronts the reader with the soldier’s anxiety as our vision is obscured by the fog of war. The Battle is explained in a paranoid stream-of-consciousness style –one moment we face a sudden hail of gunfire while wondering where our officers are standing as the hot breath of shells explode nearby; in another instance, we face an eruption of shelling described as leaves tinkling in the trees. We duck as cannon fire whizzes by overhead; we quake hearing the far-off sound of a rebel yell; and we lament the loss of life as all the dying men lie strewn about on the battlefield. Of all Michael Shaara’s talents –and there are many– perhaps he is most skilled at vividly conveying the nearness of the people, architecture, terrain, climate, topography, geography, and intimate details from the field of battle. It gives the reader a palpable sense of presence, almost as if we are there at Gettysburg in 1863. Suffice it to say The Killer Angels marks an extraordinary achievement in Civil War literature. It offers a rare blend of meticulous historical research coupled with gripping, engaging entertainment. I was particularly delighted to read The Killer Angels on its 50^th anniversary in 2024.  

“On June 15 the first troops of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee commanding, slip across the Potomac at Williamsport and begin the invasion of the North” (xix).

The Killer Angels tells the story of Gettysburg across four days from multiple historically-imagined perspectives –each section opening with an epigraph containing lyrics from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It begins on Monday, June 29, 1863 as the invading Confederate Army marches north, raiding the Dutch farms and German orchards along the way (and also capturing black Americans and sending them further south to be sold into slavery, but this fact is absent in the novel). Suddenly, a spy named “Harrison” secretly reveals the location of the Army of the Potomac to General James Longstreet and General Robert E. Lee. And this leads to complete change of position as a weblike convergence of armies descends upon the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where one of the defining battles is to take place. Shaara describes Gettysburg as “a small neat place” with “white board houses, rail fences, all in order, one white church steeple.” It is deserted with two hills one wooded and green, the other topped by a cemetery, with plenty of flat open ground. What did it feel like to be at Gettysburg in 1863? “All that month there is heat and wild rain. Cherries are ripening over all Pennsylvania, and the men gorge as they march. The civilians have fled and houses are dark. The armies move north through the heat and the dust” (xxiv). As the soldiers from both sides begin to arrive Gettysburg, many of the men somewhat amusingly suffer from the “old soldier’s sickness” from eating too many cherries.   

What does the Army of Northern Virginia look like? According to Shaara “It is an army of seventy thousand men. They are rebels and volunteers. They are mostly unpaid and usually self-equipped. It is an army of remarkable unity, fighting for disunion. It is Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Though there are men who cannot read or write, they all speak English. They share common customs and a common faith and they have been consistently victorious against superior numbers. They have as solid a faith in their leader as any veteran army that ever marched. They move slowly behind the Blue Ridge, using the mountains to screen their movements. Their main objective is to draw the Union Army out into the open where it can be destroyed. By the end of the month they are closing on Harrisburg, having spread panic and rage and despair through the North” (xix). The Confederate soldiers approach Gettysburg with victorious memories fresh in their minds of the two battles at Manassas (or “Bull Run”), as well as Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville.

Likewise, what does the Army of the Potomac look like? It is “a strange new kind of army, a polyglot mass of vastly dissimilar men, fighting for union. There are strange accents and strange religions and many who do not speak English at all. Nothing like this army has been seen upon the planet. It is a collection of men from many different places who have seen much defeat and many commanders. They are volunteers: last of the great volunteer armies, for the draft is beginning that summer in the North. They have lost faith in their leaders but not in themselves. They think this will be the last battle, and they are glad it is to be fought on their own home ground. They come up from the South, eighty thousand men, up the narrow roads that converge toward the blue ridge mountains. The country through which they march is some of the most beautiful country in the Union. It is the third summer of the war” (xx).

The fighting begins on Wednesday, July 1, 1863 (“The First Day”) when a boy from Illinois climbs a tree along Marsh Creek and shoots at advancing “Johnny Reb” soldiers, and the narrative continues as John Buford brilliantly holds the line against the invading southerners and we are taken through an exciting crescendo into the second day as Chamberlain’s men triumphantly manage to maintain control over the rocky hill (“Little Round Top”) before the third and final day of battle on July 3, 1863 which finally forces Lee’s soldiers to retreat when they prove themselves unable to break the Union line. In my opinion, among the many dramatized events in the novel, the Battle of Little Round Top is truly unforgettable.

The principal Confederate characters are:

• Robert E. (Edward) Lee: age 57, five feet, ten inches tall, with short legs and a red face, like all the Lees. He is “an honest man and a gentleman” who doesn’t drink or smoke or gamble. He doesn’t read novels or plays because he believes they weaken the mind. He does not own any slaves and he does not believe in slavery, “but he does not believe that the Negro, ‘in the present stage of his development,’ can be considered the equal of the white man.” He is the most beloved man in either army, he loves God and Virginia, but he has started experiencing attacks of heart disease which will soon kill him. He marches with the knowledge of a letter prepared by Jefferson Davis to be placed on Abraham Lincoln’s desk the day after Lee was expected to destroy the Army of the Potomac somewhere north of Washington. Throughout the book, he seems to grow increasingly weary and by the end, he blames himself for the failed invasion of the North. He is sometimes derisively called the “King of Spades” for his decision to dig trenches around Richmond. To General James Longstreet, his right-hand man, Lee says, “You were right. And I was wrong. And now you must help me see what must be done. Help us to see. I become… very tired” (326). General Lee asks to be relieved but his request is not granted and he serves until the end of the war and eventually lays down his arms when the time comes. He asks Congress for a pardon but it is never given. According to Shaara, he dies of heart disease in 1870, “perhaps the most beloved general in the history of American war.”
• James Longstreet: also called “Old Pete” and sometimes “The Dutchman,” was Lee’s right-hand man after the death of Stonewall Jackson by friendly fire. He is slow-talking and crude –”one of the first of the new soldiers, the cold-eyed men who have sensed the birth of the new war of machines. He has invented a trench and a theory of defensive warfare, but in that courtly company few will listen. He is one of the few high officers n that army not from Virginia” (xxi). During the past winter, three of his children all died of a fever in Richmond leading him to often withdraw from the men. He was famously opposed the invasion of Pennsylvania but once the decision was made, he dutifully followed orders in spite of his objections. After the battle, Longstreet also asks to be relieved on the ground that he believes there is no possible victory for the South, but he is convinced to remain beside Lee. “’Sir, I have been a soldier all my life. I have served from the ranks on up. You know my service. I have to tell you no, sir, that I believe this attack will fail. I believe that no fifteen thousand men ever set for battle could take that hill, sir’” (280). He is later severely wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. After the war, he becomes a Republican and pledges to work with Grant to rebuild the South. For this, he is reviled by southerners and branded a turncoat –“the most hated man in the South.” Also, after Lee’s death, Longstreet blames the loss on Lee. For these two public transgressions, he is never forgiven by the South. Years later, at the great reunion of the Army of Northern Virginia, he was not even invited but, ever the stubborn man, he arrives anyway and is embraced by Jefferson Davis. Longstreet’s theories on defensive warfare, while not heeded during the Civil War, are nevertheless considered generations ahead of his time (though, in reality, defensive warfare can be easily traced back thousands of years to the Greeks and the Romans).
• George Pickett: age 42, he was last in his class at West Point though he was an affable and beloved figure. He was in love with a woman half his age, a schoolgirl from Lynchburg named LaSalle Corbelle. A close personal friend of Abraham Lincoln who appointed him at West Point, no one in the Confederacy is permitted to insult Lincoln in his presence. On the march toward Gettysburg, his Virginia Division is last and he worries he might miss the last great battle of the war. He served alongside Longstreet and Armistead in the Mexican American War in the Old Sixth Infantry out in California. After the disastrous Battle of Gettysburg, George Pickett’s division is virtually destroyed –all field officers are injured, seven of his colonels are killed, six are wounded. Pickett survives but he continues to brood over the war loss. In later years, he and John Singleton Mosby visit an ailing Robert E. Lee, but it is said to anything but a friendly reunion. Pickett continues to blame Lee for destroying his division for many years to come.  
• Richard Ewell: age 46 and “egg-bald, one-legged, recently married” (he refers to his new wife as “Mrs. Brown”). Eccentric and brilliant, he is chosen to succeed Stonewall Jackson’s former command. He has lost a leg and “he approaches Gettysburg unsure of himself, in command of twenty thousand men.” In the novel, he freezes and fails to take Cemetery Hill (a legacy that remains mired in controversy to this day), and after Gettysburg, Ewell continued to serve while later admitting many of his own mistakes at the Battle of Gettysburg.
• Ambrose Powell Hill: age 37, he is in command of Stonewall Jackson’s other corps. Wealthy and moody, he is often combative with his superiors, and does not like following orders. He hopes to climb to a place in Richmond society. He wears a red shirt into battle but often misses battle due inexplicable sickness (as in the case of Gettysburg). But Ambrose Powell Hill was never to attain his desired status in Richmond society as he was killed by a sniper at the Battle of Five Forks, five days before Appomattox.
• Lewis Armistead: age 46, he was commander of one of George Pickett’s brigades. He is called “Lo” by the soldiers, short for “Lothario,” and is a shy, silent, widower. A fierce fighter who was known for being suspended from West Point as a cadet after hitting Jubal Early in the head with a plate. He is an admirer of Winfield Scott Hancock who is now fighting for the union (Gettysburg is a reunion of sorts). He leads his men to the furthest point achieved by the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg, but he is wounded and captured before dying in a field hospital.
• Richard Brooke Garnett: age 44, he commands the second of Pickett’s brigades. “A dark-eyed, silent, tragic man,” he previously served under Stonewall Jackson and was forced to retreat from an impossible situation. Jackson ordered a court-martial but his death ended the punishment, and Garnett has been accused of cowardice; he is eager to reaffirm his honor. He enters Gettysburg so ill he can barely walk. He is killed at Pickett’s Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg.
• J.E.B. Stuart: age 30, he is a “laughing banjo player” and a fine soldier, albeit a vain man. His mission is to keep Lee informed of the Union Army movements, but he fails. He returns after day two to an frosty reception from the likes of Lee and Longstreet.
• Jubal Early: age 46, he is the commander of one of Ewell’s divisions. A cautious, calculating, bitter, icy man. Dick Ewell defers to him, though Longstreet despises him, and Lee calls him “my bad old man.” After Gettysburg, Jubal Early continues to serve until he is relieved by Lee “because of complaints against him by citizens he has offended.” He later becomes the Southern officer most involved in attempting to blame the loss at Gettysburg on Longstreet, and he also becomes the central figure in the Louisiana lottery, which cost thousands of Southerners thousands of dollars.
• Isaac Trimble: is left behind to be captured by the enemy during Gettysburg. He loses his leg but survives the war.
• Arthur Fremantle: an Englishman who serves with the Confederacy for about three months. He reflects on how the South were all Englishmen (Lee being a member of the Church of England) and he fantasizes about the south being English soil once again. He writes a book about his experience in the war that predicts a Southern victory.
• John Bell Hood: walks away with a withered arm for the rest of his life and his army is later defeated by Sherman in Atlanta. He spends the rest of his days attempting to justify his own actions in the field.
• Dorsey Pender: dies of his wounds after hemorrhages and suffers a leg amputation.
• Johnston Pettigrew: survives the battle with a hand wound but is shot to death ten days later in a “delaying action” guarding the Confederate retreat across the Potomac.
• The spy known as “Harrison” is an actor who essentially vanishes from all records, though he has a brief chance encounter with Moxley Sorrel years later. Sorrel was attending a play in which Harrison was performing, but they do not speak for very long together.

The principal Union characters are:

• Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain: a colonel at the age of 34. He prefers to be called “Lawrence.” He is a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin University, and professor of Natural and Revealed Religion, a successor to the famous Professor Stowe (husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe). He enlists with the Main volunteers and marches off to war “with a vast faith in the brotherhood of man.” He spends the long night at Fredericksburg by piling corpses in front of him to shield bullets. He comes to Gettysburg with the hard fragment of his regiment that survived. One week before Gettysburg he is given command of the regiment, and his youngest brother Thomas becomes his aide. He is perhaps best remembered for his triumphant fight on the dark rear slope of a small rocky hill called Little Round Top. He is severely wounded and promoted to brigadier general by Ulysses Grant at Petersburg and he is chosen by Grant to receive the Southern surrender at Appomattox, he is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his victory at the Battle of Little Round Top. He is later elected governor of Maine by the largest margin up that point, and returned for three more terms, but alienated his political friends by refusing to agree to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. In 1876, he was elected president of Bowdoin University/College where he modernized the school by de-emphasizing religion and pursuing a science-based education (he facing student demonstrations against the presence of ROTC). He also received the medal of honor from France for distinguished efforts in international education. He later died of his war wounds in 1914 at the age of 83.
  • Note: the title of the novel The Killer Angels is derived from a moment in which Chamberlain recalls quoting Shakespeare to his father: “What a piece of work is man… in action how like an angel!” And the old man would smile and respond: “Well, boy, if he’s an angel, he’s sure a murderin’ angel.” Chamberlain later went on to deliver a college oration on the subject: “Man, the Killer Angel.”
• John Buford: age 37, he is “a cavalry soldier, restless and caged in the tamed and political East, who loves the great plains and the memory of snow.” Already badly wounded and not long to live. Arrives first into Gettysburg, a very capable officer, he knows the value of ground. John Buford was “never to receive the recognition for his part in choosing the ground and holding it, and in so doing saving not only the battle but perhaps the war.” He died later that year of pneumonia.
• John Reynolds: age 42, he is “perhaps the finest soldier in the Union Army.” Like Lee, he is a former commander of West Point, a courteous gentleman. His home is not far from Gettysburg, he has fallen in love late in life with a Catholic girl, but hasn’t told his protestant family (he wears her ring in a chain around his neck). Recently summoned to Washington and offered command, he respectfully declines, not believing the army can be commanded from Washington. Thus, command passes to George Meade and Reynolds rides into Gettysburg on the morning of the First Day.
• George Gordon Meade: is the new Union general. He is age 47, vain and bad-tempered, balding and full of self-pity. He has taken command of the army on June 28, two days before the battle. According to Shaara, “No decision he makes at Gettysburg will be decisive, except perhaps the last.” After the Union wins its strident victory, Meade considers retreating from Gettysburg, but he was overruled by all of his top generals.
• Winfield Scott Hancock: age 39, he is Armistead’s old friend. A magnetic leader with a superb presence, he is everywhere on the battlefield and waits for Lew Armistead at the top of Cemetery Hill. Winfield Scott Hancock survives the war and being an enormously popular man, he runs for the presidency as a democrat in 1880 but he loses and retires from public life.

(Note: some of these biographical/historical facts presented by Shaara are disputed, especially his portrayal of Longstreet’s delayed advance during the battle).

“I have avoided historical opinions,” Shaara writes in his foreword to the book, however he quite evidently offers his own subtle “historical opinions” throughout the novel. His heroes are obviously James Longstreet on the Confederate side, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain on the Union side –Longstreet being the lone voice of reason who argues for a defensive position in the South rather than an invasion of the North (he disagrees with Lee’s decision); and Chamberlain being the heroic Union idealist who delivers a rousing defense of the war to a group of mutineers in a highly memorable and aspirational scene (I have tried to faithfully copy the text of his speech to mutineers below):

“I’ve been ordered to take you men with me. I’ve been told that if you don’t come along I can shoot you. Well, you know I won’t do that. Not Maine men. I won’t shoot any man who doesn’t want this fight. Maybe someone else will, but I won’t. So that’s that… Here’s the situation. I’ve been ordered to take you along, and that’s what I’m going to do. Under guard if necessary. But you can have your rifles if you want them. The whole Reb army is up the road a ways waiting for us and this is no time for an argument like this. I tell you this: we sure can use you. We’re down below half strength and we need you, no doubt of that. But whether you fight or not is up to you. Whether you come along, well, you’re coming… Well, I don’t want to preach to you. You know who we are and what we’re doing here. But if you’re going to fight alongside us there’s a few things I want you to know… This regiment was formed last fall, back in Maine. There were a thousand of us then. There’s not three hundred of us now… but what is left is choice… Some of us volunteered to fight for Union. Some came in mainly because we were bored at home and this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came… because it was the right thing to do. All of us have seen men die. Most of us never saw a black man back home. We think on that, too. But freedom is not just a word… This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you’ll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or because they like killing. But we’re here for something new. I don’t… this hasn’t happened much in the history of the world. We’re an army going out to set other men free… This is free ground. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here’s a place to build a home. It isn’t the land –there’s always more land. It’s the idea that we all have value, you and me, we’re worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I’d die for, but I’m not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we’re all fighting for, in the end, is each other” (27-28).

Needless to say, nearly all the mutineers decide to freely join Chamberlain’s 20^th Maine (much to his own surprise). And on the flipside, while Lee is not exactly portrayed in a favorable light –indeed he is often described as obstinate, sickly, and fatigued– perhaps the chief villain in the novel might well be J.E.B. Stuart, the Confederate general wanders through the wilderness entirely cut off from Lee’s army while his compatriots are engaged in the battle of their lives. However, much to its credit, The Killer Angels is not a simplistic tale of heroes and villains.   

But following the rise of its popularity, The Killer Angels has faced its share of criticism, particularly after the release of the film Gettysburg in 1993 –a film which many critics argue contains echoes of the decidedly revisionist “Lost Cause” mythology which sadly remains so potent in the minds of some Americans even to this day. One of those critics of The Killer Angels is Scott Hartwig, a historian who worked at Gettysburg National Monument for twenty years. Among his many books, he penned a corrective guidebook entitled The Killer Angels Companion which challenged several historical embellishments Shaara presents in the novel. Personally, I do not pretend to be a Civil War expert, but this minor uproar over the believability of The Killer Angels does raise an important question about the nature of literature writ large. What debt does the novelist owe to the historical record? Should he limit himself to historical facts? How much leeway should be granted in reimagining the minds and motives of key historical figures? Where is the line between fiction and history? These are tricky questions. Historical fiction has always been a difficult genre, and few topics are more controversial in the United States than the Civil War, but The Killer Angels still remains a remarkable achievement in my view. It manages to walk a fine line, offering a nuanced perspective, without endorsing the widely-debunked “Lost Cause” narrative. In some ways, after reading The Killer Angels, I was reminded of an earlier Pulitzer Prize-winner The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Both novels are attempts at reimagining an important historical event, however of these two novels I greatly prefer The Killer Angels.

In closing, as with all Civil War works, the cause of the war and how it is portrayed, is of central concern. With this in mind, how does Shaara’s book stand up? Early in the story, he allows the Confederacy to speak for itself regarding their view of the cause of the war: “What we are fighting for is our freedom from the rule of what is to us a foreign government. That’s all we want and that’s what this war is all about. We established this country in the first place with strong state governments just for that reason, to avoid a central tyranny-“ (62). Uniquely, we are allowed to hear from Confederate soldiers as to their perspective on the war. And whenever Confederate troops are captured, they claim their cause is states’ rights (or states’ “rats” as mentioned in one amusing instance). But exactly which rights are they referring to? They are unable to say. Mercifully, The Killer Angels is not a sympathetic defense of the Confederacy, but rather it allows readers the opportunity to better understand the key people involved from their own perspective. It allows for an examination and interrogation the retrograde claims of supposed states’ rights advocates. And as the novel unfolds and various anecdotes occur –such as a scene in which Chamberlain’s men administer medical attention to a black man—it becomes clear why the Confederacy decided to enshrine and protect “negro slavery” in its Constitution, and why all the seceding states cited slavery as the chief cause of the war in their declarations, and why the leadership of the Confederacy cited “African slavery” and “the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization” as the immediate cause for the conflict. In The Killer Angels the war is unequivocally about slavery, regardless of ow much some members of the Confederacy try to deny it. As Tom Chamberlain later says to his brother, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain: “Thing I cannot understand. Thing I will never understand. How can they fight so hard, them Johnnies, and all for slavery?… If it weren’t for the slaves, there’d never have been no war, now would there?… I don’t care how much political fast-talking you hear, that’s what it’s all about and that’s what them fellers died for, and I tell you, Lawrence, I don’t understand it at all” (329).

---

Notable Quotations:

“This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun here. The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it. But he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he as fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all these former Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as a foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith. The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land” (26, reflections by Colonel Chamberlain). 

“And then Lee thought: But sometimes I have seen it happen. A man loses a part of himself, an arm, a leg, and though he has been a fine soldier he is never quite the same again; he has lost nothing else visible, but there is a certain softness in the man thereafter, a slowness, a caution” (136).

“This is the great battle. Tomorrow or the next day. This will determine the war. Virginia is here, all the South is here. What will you do tomorrow?” (137).

“He [Chamberlain] felt a slow deep flow of sympathy. To be alien and alone, among white lords and glittering machine, uprooted by brute force and threat of death from the familiar earth of what he did not even know was Africa, to be shipped in black stinking darkness across an ocean he had not dreamed existed, forced then to work on alien soil, strange beyond belief, by men with guns whose words he could not even comprehend. What could the black man know of what was happening? What could this man know of borders and states’ rights and the Constitution and Dred Scott? What did he know of the war? And yet he was truly what it was all about. It simplified to that. Seen in the flesh, the cause of the war was brutally clear” (163, Chamberlain’s reflections when his soldiers find a black man).

“Soldiering has one great trap… To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is… a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so few good officers. Although there are many good men” (182).

“He moved forward and began to climb the big hill in the dark. As he walked he forgot his pain; his heart began to beat quickly, and he felt an incredible joy. He looked at himself, wonderingly, at the beloved men around him, and he said to himself: Lawrence, old son, treasure this moment. Because you feel as good as a man can feel” (225).

“’God in heaven,’ Longstreet said, and repeated it, ‘there’s no strategy to this bloody war. What it is old Napoleon and a hell of a lot of chivalry. That’s all it is. Hat were the tactics at Chancellorsville, where we divided the army, divided it, so help me God, in the face of the enemy, and got away with it because Joe Hooker froze cold in his stomach? What were the tactics yesterday? What were they today? And what will be the blessed tactics tomorrow? I’ll tell you the tactics tomorrow. Devious? Christ in Heaven. Tomorrow we ill attack an enemy that outnumbers us, an enemy that outguns us, an enemy dug in on the high ground, and let me tell you, if we win that one it will not be because of the tactics or because we are great strategists or because there is anything even remotely intelligent about the war at all. It will be a bloody miracle, a bloody miracle’” (240, Longstreet privately expressing his doubts to Fremantle after the second day at Gettysburg). 

“It was darker now. Late afternoon. If Meade was coming he would have to come soon. But there was no sign of it. A few guns were still firing a long way off; heartbroken men would not let it end. But the fire was dying; the guns ended like sparks. Suddenly it was still, enormously still, a long pause in the air, a waiting, a fall. And there was a different silence. Men began to turn to look out across the smoldering field. The wind had died; there was no motion anywhere but the slow smoke drifting and far off one tiny flame of a burning tree. The men stood immobile across the field. The knowledge began to pass among them, passing without words, that it was over. The sun was already beginning to set beyond new black clouds which were rising in the west, and men came out into the open to watch the last sunlight flames across the fields. The sun died gold and red, and the final light across the smoke was red, and then the slow darkness came out of the trees and flowed up the field to the stone wall, moving along above the dead and the dying like the shadowing wing of an enormous bird, but still far off beyond the cemetery there was golden light in the trees on the hill, a golden glow over the rocks and the men in the last high places, and then it was done, and the field was gray” (323, Longstreet’s perspective at the end of the third day).

“He remembered with awe the clean fields of morning, the splendid yellow wheat. This was another world. His on mind was blasted and clean, windblown; he was still slightly in shock from the bombardment and he sat not thinking of anything but watching the last light of the enormous day, treasuring the last gray moment. He knew he had been present at one of the great moments in history. He had seen them come out of the trees and begin the march up the slope and when he closed his eyes he could still see them coming. It was a sight few men were privileged to see and many who had seen it best had not lived through it. He knew that he would carry it with him as long as he lived, and he could see himself as an old man trying to describe it to is grandchildren, the way the men had looked as they came out into the open and formed for  the assault, the way they stood there shining and immobile, all the flags high and tilting and glittering in the sun, and then the way they all kicked to motion, suddenly, all beginning to move at once, too far away for the separate feet to be visible so that there seemed to be a silvery rippling all down the line, and that was the moment when he first felt the real fear of them coming: when he saw them begin to move” (328, Chamberlain’s reflections after the end of the battle).  

Whereas the novel opens with quotations from Woodrow Wilson, E.M. Forster, a letter from Robert E. Lee, and John Brown after his capture, it closes with a quotation from Winston Churchill in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (which I have read twice now): “Thus ended the American Civil War, which must upon the whole be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.”

---

On the 1975 Pulitzer Prize Decision

Notably, all three fiction jurors in 1975 had previously served on fiction juries throughout 1950s-1970s:

• Chair: Carlos Baker (1909-1987) was the former Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton (his PhD dissertation explored the influence of Spencer on Shelley’s poetry), retiring in 1977. He penned a critically lauded biography of Ernest Hemingway (authorized) in 1969 which was nevertheless criticized by Hemingway’s third wife Martha Gellhorn. Baker also wrote well-regarded biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he edited volumes of poetry on Shelley, Keats, Longfellow, Coleridge, Fielding, and others. He contributed book reviews for numerous publications including The New York Times Book Review and The New Republic, he published a novel entitled “A Friend in Power” in 1958, and a collection of poetry entitled “A Year and a Day” in 1963. In 1976, Mr. Baker served as chairman for the editorial committee of the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Administration which selected 100 masterpieces of American literature for publication by the Franklin Library. During his tenure at Princeton, Baker was the teacher of A. Scott Berg, the contemporary biographer who has written bestselling books about Max Perkins, Samuel Goldwyn, Katharine Hepburn, Woodrow Wilson, and Charles Lindbergh (a book which later won the Pulitzer itself).
• P. (Pierre) Albert “Al” Duhamel (1920-2006) was a professor of English at several prominent universities, including the University of Chicago (1945-1949) and most notably at Boston University (1949-1990). He received his BA from Holy Cross College and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Duhamel was involved with a variety of literary organizations like the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to serving on the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Jury, he also served on the National Book Award Jury (1972-1973). He was the book editor at the Boston Herald where he wrote a weekly column entitled “I’ve Been Reading” and he later hosted a literary television show, reportedly sporting a Harris tweed and often flanked by fellow academics, entitled “People Are Reading.” Interestingly enough, an odd and amusing episode of the show “People Are Reading” gave Julia Child her initial television debut, but it was typically a dry academic program that has been described as a predecessor to more contemporary shows like Charlie Rose. When Dumahel died in 2006 he was survived by his daughter.  
• Jean Stafford (1915-1979) was a celebrated American writer. She wrote several novels but it was her short stories that earned widespread critical acclaim. In 1955, she on an O. Henry Award for her short story “In the Zoo” and she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her collected short stories in 1970. As far as I can tell, Stafford’s presence on the 1972 Fiction jury serves as one of the first instances in which the Pulitzer Prize invited a former Fiction winner to join a latter-day Fiction jury. Click here for my full review of her Pulitzer Prize victory in 1970.

In the jury report submitted to Mrs. Valenstein (John Hohenberg’s assistant), chairman Carlos Baker wrote: “Your fiction jury has now made up its collective mind and I am empowered by Jean Stafford and Albert Duhamel to tell you that out of the immense welter of indescribably bad fiction we have chosen one novel to which all of us would be happy to see the prize awarded—happy both now and in the future. We recommend no other.” Pierre Duhamel strongly recommended the book as a “credible recreation of what happened –like Tolstoi about Borodino—but, more importantly, as a rouser of a story which needs no obscenities to remind us of what man might be.” Jean Stafford found it to be engrossing so she re-read it, and noted that her father was a civil War buff (along with a Punic Wars buff and Franco-Prussian Wars buff –indeed he read the Anabasis to her in the cradle).

Michael Shaara was notified of his Pulitzer Prize victory via a brief telegram which came, no doubt, as a shock. In the ensuing months, together with other Pulitzer winners and dignitaries, Shaara and his wife were invited to join President Gerald Ford for a dinner at the White House. At the dinner, Shaara was seated next to Henry Kissinger, with whom he apparently had a “brief disagreement on a forgotten intellectual matter.”

---

Who is Michael Shaara?

Michael Shaara (1928-1988) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey to an Italian immigrant family (the original spelling of his name was “Sciarra” and his name is pronounced “Share-uh”). He graduated from Rutgers University and served as a paratrooper in the 82^nd Airborne Divisions, rising to the rank of sergeant. He was an amateur boxer and worked as a police officer –he has often been compared to a Hemingway-esque archetype of a man’s man (and perhaps this is also why he favored similarly styled heroes like Colonel Chamberlain in The Killer Angels). In 1960, he became a creative writing professor at Florida State University, where he won a faculty-wide award for excellence in teaching. He wrote some seventy short stories, often publishing in pulp fiction magazines like Astounding and Galaxy, and later in the Saturday Evening Post, Playboy, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and others. His first novel The Broken Place was published in 1968; it was the story of a Korean War veteran.

Shaara was then paid $3,500 by McKay to write The Killer Angels, a book which nearly killed him during his seven years of writing (a smoker of four packs of cigarettes a day, he suffered a heart attack during the writing process). Then while on leave for a Florida State University teaching assignment in Italy in 1972, a motor-scooter accident put Shaara in a coma for about seven weeks. Tragically, he never fully recovered –his writing skills were significantly diminished, and he was left with a permanent speech impediment. He managed to publish one more novel The Herald in 1981 (also known as “The Noah Conspiracy”), which was an apocalyptic science fiction novel about the fate of humanity.

Michael Shaara died in 1988 at the age of 59 of a heart attack. He was survived by his two children, Jeffrey and Lila, both of whom are also novelists. Jeffrey has continued his father’s legacy with a string of Civil War novels (writing both a prequel and sequel to The Killer Angels), along with a variety of other historical novels about World War II, the Korean War, the Mexican-American War, pre-Revolutionary America, and other key moments in American history. In 1991, Michael Shaara’s baseball novel For Love of the Game was posthumously published and it was also made into a 1999 film. In 1997, Jeffrey Shaara established the annual Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction at Gettysburg College.

The Killer Angels owes much of its renewed success, in no small part, to Ken Burns’s smash-hit Civil War documentary which aired on PBS to over 40 million viewers in 1990. Its success led media mogul Ted Turner to finance the film Gettysburg which was based on The Killer Angels. Shaara’s novel then shot up to the top of the New York Times best-seller list where it remained for four weeks (nearly 20 years after its initial publication and 5 years after the author’s death). The ensuing commercial success of Gettysburg led Ted Turner to suggest a prequel and sequel to the story, both of which were then written by Michael Shaara’s son, Jeffrey Shaara —Gods and Generals (which was his father’s original title for The Killer Angels) and The Last Full Measure. The critical and commercial failure of the 2003 film adaptation of Gods and Generals (which was another “Lost Cause” revisionist film) forced Ted Turner to cancel a film adaptation of the next book The Last Full Measure.

---

Film Adaptations:

• Gettysburg (1993)
  • Directed by: Ronald F. Maxwell
  • Starring: Tom Berenger, Jeff Daniels, Martin Sheen and others

---

Further Reading:

• Gods and Generals (1996)
  • A prequel to The Killer Angels written by Shaara’s son, Jeffrey. A film adaptation was made in 2003.
• The Last Full Measure (1998)
  • A sequel to The Killer Angels written by Shaara’s son, Jeffrey. 
• The Killer Angels Companion (1996) by Scott Hartwig
  • In this short but worthwhile primer, Scott Hartwig (sometimes written as “D. Scott Hartwig”) –a historian who worked at Gettysburg National Monument for twenty years– confesses to having “respect for this fine piece of literature” [referring to The Killer Angels] though he admits to feeling annoyed by certain historical inaccuracies in the book –“This is not to denigrate this magnificent novel in any way. It is a classic work of Civil War fiction and justly deserves the laurels it has garnered.” First, he disputes the veneration of Longstreet by Shaara –for example, had Robert E. Lee accepted Longstreet’s plan, without “Jeb” Stuart’s missing cavalry, he risked accidentally stumbling upon one of the other five Union army corps somewhere south of Gettysburg. He also notes minor discrepancies with Shaara’s characterization of Buford (he arrived at Gettysburg not to a vacant town, but one in which the citizens all flocked to celebrate the arrival of the Union soldiers). Despite Shaara’s repeated references to Buford’s cavalry being “dug in,” this is a fiction along with the highly dramatized ensuing combat sequence (Buford’s role was mainly to harass and attempt to delay the Confederate soldiers in a skirmish). Next, Hartwig addresses the controversy surrounding the Confederacy’s inability to capture Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill, believed by many Confederate veterans and historians to be a result of Richard Ewell’s indecisiveness (who is also scapegoated by Shaara), however Hartwig argues Ewell performed far better under difficult circumstances than is generally acknowledged. He further identifies a variety of differences between the book and the real battle (including Longstreet’s lack of initiative), though he agrees that Lee bears the principal responsibility for the loss at Gettysburg. And regarding Joshua Chamberlain, whose heroism is lionized in the book and the film almost to Arthurian proportions, is indeed a great hero of the war, but he was not alone atop Little Round Top (note the courage of men like Colonel Vincent Strong, Colonel Patrick O’Rorke, Lt. Holman Melcher, and Major Ellis Spear, as well). and Shaara takes considerable literary license in moving the 20th Maine from Cemetery Hill to the center of the Army of the Potomac’s position in order to place Chamberlain at the center of the conflict (in reality, the 20th Maine was moved to a ridge running north from Little Round Top). Hartwig additionally highlights discrepancies with Shaara’s account of Pickett’s Charge, and he takes aim at Shaara’s immensely controversial portrayal of Robert E. Lee as a deeply shaken old man after the failure of Picket’s Charge (but, in reality, Lee confidently shouldered the responsibility of the failure for the rest of his life). Lastly, Hartwig offers a far more detailed account of all the major figures at Gettysburg, as well as a thorough bibliography of recommended reading about Gettysburg. Scott Hartwig’s The Killer Angels Companion comes recommended from me.

---

Literary Context in 1974-1975

• Nobel Prize for Literature (1974): was awarded jointly to Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson (1900–1976) “for a narrative art, farseeing in lands and ages, in the service of freedom” and Harry Martinson (1904–1978) “for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos.”
• National Book Award Winner (1975): this was another split year with two winners – Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone and The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams.
• Booker Prize Winner (1974): was also a split year between The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer and Holiday by Stanley Middleton.
• Per Publishers Weekly, the top bestseller in 1974 was Centennial by James A. Michener (a fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner). Other bestsellers that year included: Watership Down by Richard Adams, Jaws by Peter Benchley, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre, and Something Happened by Joseph Heller.
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested for treason and deported from the Soviet Union following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
• Agatha Christie published Poirot’s Early Cases.
• Stephen King published Carrie.
• Ursula K. Le Guin published The Dispossessed.
• Madeleine L’Engle published A Wind in the Door (a companion to A Wrinkle in Time).
• The first of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City was published as a serial in The Pacific Sun.
• Anthony Burgess published The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End, the third in his quartet of comical “Enderby” novels.

---

Did The Right Book Win?

Despite the presence of some historical embellishments, I found Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels to be an immensely enthralling novel. It has inspired me to read other works of Civil War literature. It may not be an enduring work of classic literature in the manner of earlier Pulitzer Prize-winners like Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence or John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, but for many readers, The Killer Angels often ranks among the best works of historical fiction ever published, and with good reason. In my view, the Pulitzer Prize was right to honor The Killer Angels in 1975, though it is a great tragedy that Michael Shaara never lived to see his magnum opus truly flourish.   

---

Shaara, Michael. The Killer Angels. Ballantine Books Trade Paperbacks. NY, NY, 2011 (originally published in 1974).

Shaara dedicated the book to his daughter: To Lila (old George) “…in whom I am well pleased.”