The Killer Angels

The Killer Angels is a 1974 historical novel by the American writer Michael Shaara, and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. It depicts the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War along with the days leading up to it, and it is written without a single central character or an omniscient narrator.

Shaara gives the book to the officers. For the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet disagree about where and whether to attack; for the Union, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain holds a hill with a regiment that has run out of men. The novel moves between their positions as the battle develops, so the reader sees the same three days from opposite sides of the same field.

Shaara researched the battle closely, and the novel is built from the letters and reports of the people who fought it rather than from a narrator explaining the war. Its method, close to the ground and shared between viewpoints, became a much-imitated approach to writing battle fiction.