| Title | : | The Rebel in Autumn |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781623060299 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 286 |
| Publication | : | First published September 29, 2013 |
The year is 1969. Unrest on college campuses is peaking, students tune in, drop out and protest everything from the Vietnam War to racism and police brutality while old guard conservatives push back. And at one small southern university, a story censored from the college literary magazine is the match that sets the tinder box ablaze. There’s a simple solution, argues history prof Max Rainer—just publish the damn story and move on. Rainer has more important things on his mind, like his weekend getaway planned with Rona Jackson, the cute sorority girl who sits in the first row. But university president Harry Locke feels that now is the time to draw his line in the sand. He’s read about what’s been going on up at Columbia, and he’ll be damned if anything like that will happen on his watch, no sir. Locke—an undistinguished administrator at the end of his career—has misread the mood of the students, where the seeds of unrest lie just below the surface of a genteel Southern campus.
Rainer leads the faculty’s vocal opposition to the story’s censorship, students begin to skip class to protest, and Locke’s closest advisor tells him now is no time to rebel against forces beyond his control. But the battle lines are drawn and neither side can give in. When the administration building is taken over and the students begin a sit-in, that’s when the fires start. And that’s when the police are called in. Rainer tries to keep the peace. But with the agitation of a Vietnam vet-turned-hippie and a recently politicized black music student with a rifle, the stage is set for a deadly showdown.
Written just before the fatal shootings of four students at Kent State in Ohio, and then forgotten in a drawer for nearly 45 years, The Rebel in Autumn is now published for the first time anywhere, ready to take its place as one of the great works of American fiction from a time when words mattered.
With an introduction by the author's son, New York Times bestselling novelist Jeff Shaara.
The Rebel in Autumn Reviews
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Since Michael Shaara's "Killer Angels" is among my top 10, I thought it would be interesting to read this work that preceded it. This book was rejected by most publishers as a bit too prescient with regard to events related to college protests in the late 60's, a time period that I lived through as a college student. The book does a good job of capturing the zeitgeist and the characterization is good and the story interesting. So why only 3 stars?
Well, his son Jeff, who has written some extremely good novels based on U.S. wars, says that after they came across the manuscript, they opted to publish it "as is" as Michael Shaara's vision, unadulterated, unaltered, unmodernized. The punctuation may be a little funky - my father liked using dashes rather than for quote marks for dialogue, but in the end we liked the writing so much that we felt that we would present what might today be called 'the director's cut'.
Frankly, I think they have done him a great disservice. Annoying as the dashes in lieu of quote marks are, it is the typos that really get in the way. Some are minor and there are many, some almost Freudian - black character named Sam misspelled Ham, for example and the real howler where a speaker looked out among the crowd and was "pleased to see so many new feces".
It makes one appreciate the efforts of solid editors and proofreaders! Still, it did take me back on a trip down memory lane that was quite worth the reminiscing. -
This gem of a novel is an accurate immersion into campus life in the 1960s, especially the protests and the discussions of university censorship of student materials. Inspired by an event at Florida State University (FSU) in which the president banned a short story from the college literary magazine due to the use of a few "dirty words," the story begins with a grim sense of reality.
Shaara (1928-1988), who taught creative writing at FSU at the time would have known about the incident as well as the machinations within a university faculty. The true event was resolved more amicably than the fictional event in "The Rebel in Autumn" which, for readers, presents an opportunity to see how in a time of national stress over the Vietnam War, segregation, and other issues a relatively mundane matter can spiral out of control to be the point of a looming threat of violence.
The characters--both students and faculty--are well developed and display multiple points of view about the prior restraint (pre-publication censorship) that had generally vanished from the American scene (except within student publications and college administrations).
Just how to "fix" the situation is more difficult than it sounds when you have a university president following the letter of the law that says he is the publisher of all student publications and can restrict what is released. As one faculty member said, the president had the power to ban the short story, but not the right.
Every character in the book is at risk one way or the other. Faculty members can be fired or demoted; students can be expelled. Anyone can be harmed if outside agitators or the National Guard (as we saw at Kent State in 1970) appear on campus. Shaara paints the evolving sense of danger perfectly down to the dramatic conclusion.
Kudos to Shaara's son Jeff and daughter Lila for overseeing the posthumous publication of "The Rebel in Autumn" as well as other Shaara novels that had gone out of print. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Killer Angels" (1974) has remained in print. The family chose to publish "Rebel" as is rather than second-guessing the changes Shaara might have made during the editing and revision process that occurs once a manuscript is accepted. I agree with their decision with one exception, that being the lack of a blank line or a printed separator between scene changes; this would have reduced the confusion that occurs when scenes run together.
Disclaimer: I was a friend and a student in Shaara's creative writing class at the time he was working on this novel. I didn't know about the novel then, but students and Shaara had many discussions about censorship and other issues both in and out of class. My potential bias is enhanced because I was fired from a college after a long-running debate about its censorship of student publications of which I was the academic advisor. -
A novel about campus rebellion in the 60s…well-developed characters and a plot that keeps things moving…a rather melodramatic ending but the novel nicely captures the tone and tenor of that period while focusing on the personal rather than the political. Nicely-done, previously unpublished piece of work by a Pulitzer Prize winner.
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Every minute of this book was excruciating.
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I got tired of this book and quit reading it. I was hoping for something similar to THE KILLER ANGELS, a book I love. Sadly, it was not.
