My favorite historical novel is Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1975. It is a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant, using a half-dozen principal characters (only one of them entirely fictional) to get at the various meanings of the war. I assign this book in my undergraduate course on the Civil War and Reconstruction at Princeton; it is perennially the students’ favorite reading in the course.

—James M. McPherson, George Henry Davis Professor of American History, Princeton University, and author, Battle Cry of Freedom

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The Killer Angels is the best Civil War novel ever written, even better than The Red Badge of Courage, which inspired it. More than any other work of fiction, The Killer Angels shows what it was like to be in that war. The descriptions of combat are incomparable; they convey not just the sights but the noise and smell of battle. And the characterizations are simply superb. Here, I think, is the most honest and perceptive characterization of Robert E. Lee in all our literature. Shaara has managed to capture the essence of the war, the divided friendships, the madness and the heroism of fratricidal conflict. The book builds inexorably to the climax in Pickett’s suicidal charge (which ought to be known as Lee’s charge). If I had to choose just one book that best captures the Civil War, this would be it.

—Stephen B. Oates, author, With Malice toward None

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The Killer Angels is the only book that’s ever made me cry—apart from “Filing Your 1040” by the IRS.

—Christopher Buckley, author, Wet Work and The White House Mess

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For many years I had wanted to do a history of the Civil War on film but had never been able to get up the courage. All my previous films pointed to that terrible war as the central moment in our history, in a sense the war demanded that it be treated, yet it seemed a black hole that could swallow better men than me. Moreover, most of my friends and colleagues counseled against attempting it or urged me to tackle only a small aspect of the war. But then on Christmas Day, 1984,1 finished reading a book that changed my life. It was The Killer Angels.

I had never visited Gettysburg, knew almost nothing about that battle before I read the book, but here it all came alive. As Shaara structures his novel, each chapter sees the action from the point of view of a different character. Lee, Longstreet, Buford—all vividly narrate the tragedy and drama of those three days in July 1863. But the book focused mainly on a man I