Michael Shaara was born on June 23, 1929 in Jersey City, N.J., and died on May 5, 1988 in Tallahassee, Florida. He was the son of Michael Joseph Shaara, Sr., an Italian immigrant and union organizer, and Allene (Maxwell) Shaara. He married Helen Elizabeth Krumwiede in 1950 (marriage which ended in 1980), and had two children: Jeffrey and Lila Elise. Shaara graduated from Rutgers University with a B.A. in 1951, and continued with graduate studies at Columbia University (1952-53) and University of Vermont (1953-54). Although he knew in Rutgers that writing would be the main goal of his life, his prolific short story career began in the 1950s, after a short stint as a paratrooper, a merchant seaman, and a police officer in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1959, Shaara was hired as an instructor of English at Florida State University, and by 1968, he had risen to the position of Associate Professor. Shaara received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975 for his novel, The Killer Angels .
Shaara wrote four novels and published more than 70 short stories in magazines including Cosmopolitan, Galaxy, Fantastic Universe, Playboy, Redbook and the Saturday Evening Post . He began writing in the science fiction and fantasy genres for the popular pulp fiction magazines of the time and won several awards. It was the fifties --- J.R.R. Tolkien published his trilogy Lord of the Rings and Russia launched Sputnik into orbit. The space race began and shortly after, the country was threatened by the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962. Shaara's themes reflected his times and dealt with everyday events, as well as with aliens, and the devastation of complete cities from nuclear disasters.
During his writing career, he received many rejections from publishers. Even his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was rejected by fifteen publishers before the small, independent David McKay Company purchased the manuscript. However, two of his novels were turned into films. In The Killer Angels, inspired by his visit to the Gettysburg battlefield, Shaara recounted the story of the bitter July 1863 battle through the eyes of the participants. His novel was adapted into the television miniseries Gettysburg after his death in 1993. The manuscript of his fourth and last novel, For Love of the Game, was found by his son after his death and published in 1991. This baseball story was picked up Universal Studios and released as a major motion picture in 1999 starring Kevin Costner.
Shaara was a dynamic man who had a wide variety of talents and interests. He had a zest for life and relished exploring the world. Unfortunately, Shaara had to contend with some serious physical conditions during the course of his life. In 1965, he had his first major heart attack and wrote about the experience in an article published by the Saturday Evening Post . The article, "In the Midst of Life", won an American Medical Association award for medical journalism. While teaching an FSU abroad program in Italy, Shaara had a devastating motorcycle accident in 1972. He was unconscious for weeks and suffered from a severe brain injury. Later he described the events in his story "Brain Damage". In his letters, Shaara claimed that his eyes were not "working together" and that he could not read very much. Shaara also had difficulty with both speech and thought patterns. Emotionally, he suffered from bouts of depression. In a 1986 letter, Shaara admitted that he was medically retired and "largely unable to write..., but am slowly coming back". He had his second heart attack in 1988 and passed away.
From the guide to the Michael Shaara Papers, 1946-1998, 1957-1987, (Broward County Library Bienes Museum of the Modern Book)
