Michael Shaara

Michael Shaara (1928–1988) was an American writer of science fiction, sports fiction, and historical fiction. He was born to Italian immigrant parents (the family name was originally spelled Sciarra, which in Italian is pronounced the same way) in Jersey City, New Jersey, graduated from Rutgers University in 1951, and served as a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne division prior to the Korean War.

Before Shaara began selling science fiction stories to fiction magazines in the 1950s, he was an amateur boxer and police officer. Shaara was an early pioneer of military science fiction, with his most iconic short story, “Soldier Boy,” serving as an early work of the subgenre, and lending its name to a later collection of his short genre fiction.

He later taught literature at Florida State University while continuing to write fiction. The stress of this and his smoking caused him to have a heart attack at the early age of thirty-six; from which he fully recovered. His novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975.