Michael Shaara is the well-known author of the historical fiction novel The Killer Angles, he has been praised and awarded for this novel. Although this novel is fictional it depicts the battle of Gettysburg quite accurately, with some minor changes to characters and scenes for artistic purposes. As a novelist he presents the battle and how it unfolded in a rather unique way for a historical novel, yet he still kept it a good and truthful representation of history. Something else unique to his historical novel is that Shaara drew one main conclusion regarding the battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War as a whole within his book. Shaara decided to write his novel very differently than most authors would for a historical novel, it is a fictional …show more content…
One critic best described Shaara’s version of the battle as "condensed some of the action . . . eliminated some minor characters . . . had to choose between conflicting viewpoints". Shaara preserved the emotion and action of the battle, while keeping the historical content true and making it a good depiction of what it was like during the civil war. Shaara wrote the book with a very distinct layout and style, he starts the book with Harrison, a spy for Longstreet, gathering information about the movements and positions of their opponent. The rest of the novel is written from two main perspectives; Lee and Longstreet for the South’s viewpoint, and Chamberlain and Buford for the North’s viewpoint. Almost every chapter …show more content…
Shaara took pride in the fact that he “painstaking (and voluminous)” researched and crafted this novel to be historically accurate as he could make it, while still creating an intriguing story. He said he made “a strenuous effort to be historically accurate” and “to get the facts straight”, therefore he is almost resents the fact that his book is described as a novel; however it must be labeled as a novel since there is dialogue between characters with no proof to prove that conversations actually occurred word for word as he wrote them. Shaara’s extreme detail in the historical content of Gettysburg can be seen in the maps, not only did he include detailed maps of the land he also accurately described the tactics and procedures they went through during this specific battle. The excruciating detail that he put into his work allowed for the novel to be an honest portrayal of the battle but still allowed him to take literary license and convey certain ideas that he felt where necessary for the story, and the understanding of the Civil