Jeff Shaara Biography

Fast Facts

• Named to serve on the Board of Trustees for the Civil War Preservation Trust in 2007, he decided to donate all the royalties from his first non-fiction book "Jeff Shaara's Civil War Battlefields" to battlefield preservation
• Won the Boyd Award for Excellence in Military Fiction for the second time for "To the Last Man․"
• His debut novel won the American Library Association's Boyd Award
• Earned his degree in Criminology at Florida State University
• After author Michael Shaara's death in 1988, he sold his business and took over his father's estate
• Though he had no prior writing experience, his first book, "Gods and Generals," a prequel to his father's classic "The Killer Angels," remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for 15 weeks
• Started a rare coin business when he was 16, which moved from his home to a retail store, then to Tampa, Fla․, where he became one of the best known coin and precious-metals dealers in the state
• Stated that his writing process for each book consists of about one year of research and six months of writing
• His novels are in the historical fiction genre and generally center on military conflicts
• Started building a house for himself in Gettysburg, Pa