Another popular theme with Shaara was boxing. "Come To My Party" is one of his better known stories in this vein. It is about a boxer who loses a prizefight because the opponent manages to avoid him in the ring, yet wins by the rules. It is based on Shaara's one loss to a fighter who "boxed, but couldn't hit." The boxer spent most of the fight avoiding Shaara and winning the match "on the rules." Shaara later observed that the man "would never have won in natural life, in a fight in a bar."
While teaching in Florida, Shaara used the boxing theme again in his first novel, The Broken Place. Published by New American Library in 1968, it is the story of a Korean War veteran, Tom McClain, seeking to be free of his demons and finding that freedom through his boxing. Shaara came back to his science-fiction roots in his third novel, The Herald, published by McGraw-Hill in 1981. The story has been described as more of a long short story than a novel. In 1982, Pocket Books published Soldier Boy, a collection of Shaara's short stories from the 1950s.
It was Michael Shaara's second novel, though, that brought him critical recognition, and its subject was a departure from both science fiction and boxing. The Killer Angels was a historical fiction about Gettysburg. Shaara's change in genre had a double catalyst: old letters and a vacation trip. The letters were from Shaara's great-grandfather, a member of the 4th Georgia Infantry, who had been injured at Gettysburg.
