It is easy to see why Michael Shaara's "The Killer Angels," which has just received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, was so honored. It is a novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, a subject of almost hypnotic fascination to laymen and military historians alike, and Mr. Shaara's narrative conveys the drama, the courage and the heartbreak of those days….

Mr. Shaara, author of a number of short stories and a previous novel, "The Broken Place," writes that his aim was to tell "what it was like to be there, what the weather was like, what men's faces looked like." For this purpose he stayed within the historical record, but blended two fictional approaches: a careful expository description of strategy and tactics, aided by a series of eloquent maps, and a graphic evocation of the clashes themselves, wherein it is shown how the small happenings, the human elements and...