Michael Shaara was born in Jersey City in 1929 and graduated from Rutgers University in 1951. His early science fiction short stories were published in "Galaxy" magazine in 1952. He later began writing other works of fiction and published more than seventy short stories in many magazines, including "The Saturday Evening Post," "Cosmopolitan," and "Redbook," His first novel, "The Broken Place," was published in 1968. But it was a simple family vacation to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1966 that gave him the inspiration for his greatest achievement, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Killer An