The Killer Angels
by Michael Shaara
Summary
Four days at Gettysburg, told from inside the heads of the men making the decisions, alternating chapter by chapter between the two armies.
On the Confederate side it is mostly James Longstreet, who can see that the ground is wrong, that the Union army holds the high ground in a fishhook, and that the answer is to swing around the flank and make them attack. He says so, repeatedly, to Robert E. Lee, who is fifty six, unwell, certain of his men, and not listening. Shaara's Lee is neither a marble statue nor a fool. He is a great commander making the worst decision of his life for reasons the book takes seriously.
On the Union side, John Buford's cavalry buys the high ground on the first morning, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a professor of rhetoric from Maine with no military training whatever, holds the far left of the line on Little Round Top with no ammunition left and orders a bayonet charge downhill.
It ends with Pickett's Charge, a mile of open ground, and Longstreet unable to give the order aloud.
Shaara worked from letters and memoirs and wrote a novel because he wanted the fear, the exhaustion and the arguments rather than the map. The prose is plain and close in, the tactical geography is always clear, and a reader needs to know nothing about the campaign going in.
Around three hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want the battle at eye level from both sides, with none of it made noble.
Historical Context & Significance
The Killer Angels won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and then sat almost unread for nearly twenty years.
Michael Shaara had published science fiction in the 1950s and was teaching at Florida State when he spent years on the manuscript, which was turned down repeatedly before a small publisher took it in 1974. Early sales were poor and it went out of print.
What changed was the film. Ron Maxwell's Gettysburg in 1993 used the novel's dialogue almost verbatim, and the book reached number one on the New York Times list nineteen years after publication, going on to sell millions of copies. It is assigned at West Point and the Army War College, and it is the main reason ordinary readers have an opinion about James Longstreet, whose reputation as the general who was right had been buried by Lost Cause writers for a century.
Shaara died of a heart attack in 1988 at fifty nine. His son Jeff Shaara wrote the prequel Gods and Generals and the sequel The Last Full Measure, and established the annual Michael Shaara Award for Civil War fiction in 1997, since given at Gettysburg College.