Jeff Shaara addresses crowd.
Posted on 11/19/2002 7:59:31 PM PST by stainlessbanner
Jeff Shaara said his father would have been thrilled to know his book "The Killer Angels" was chosen for the "One Book, Two Counties" program in Cumberland and Dauphin counties.
"His one goal was to leave something behind he'd be remembered for," Shaara said to more than 260 people who packed into Dickinson College's Rubendall Recital Hall Monday evening.
Shaara then spent several minutes weaving a tale that began in 1964, when he and his father, Michael Shaara, visited the Gettysburg Battlefield for the first time.
"I was a kid and I was the Civil War buff," he says, explaining that's why his father came to Gettysburg. But that visit changed his father's life, he said.
When they found the place where Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis Armistead fell and died on July 3, 1863, his father began to cry.
Follows passion
Michael Shaara spent the next seven years writing the novel that would become the Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
In 1970, the father-and-son team went back to Gettysburg to do more research for "The Killer Angels."
By this time Jeff Shaara was the muscle of the operation. The 18-year-old climbed the rocks and hiked the hills on the battlefield, then described what it was like for his father.
When Michael Shaara finished the book and took it to the publishers, he was turned down — 15 times.
Finally, in 1973, The David McKay Company published the book — but almost immediately went bankrupt. Because of this, the few original hard-back copies of "The Killer Angels" are worth a lot of money, Shaara said.
The next year, Michael Shaara found a new publisher and paperback copies came out. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975.
Jeff Shaara addresses crowd.
I quite liked Killer Angels -- but, for me, Company Atch is in a class almost by itself. There are a couple other memoirs / diaries that are also there. For example, _Rebel Private: Front and Rear_ by William Fletcher.
No matter how well researched and written, a novel is still a novel. The real-life remembrances of the people who were actually there, while almost certainly embellished to one degree or another, is much more powerful for me.
There are also several serious histories that I would rank well above any of either of the Shaara's novels. But I think the latter are a wonderful way to get into developing an interest.
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