Jeff Shaara’s The Last Full Measure brings a unique and monumental father-son trilogy to a triumphant conclusion.

Michael Shaara’s powerful novel, The Killer Angels, appeared in 1974, winning critical acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize. It did not, however, gain wide appeal until the movie version, Gettysburg, was released in 1994, six years after the author’s death. With Gods and Generals, published in 1996, Shaara’s son, Jeff, continued the story of the same generals. This sequel was an immediate bestseller, and filming is now underway.

With The Last Full Measure, Jeff Shaara sustains a major achievement that distinguishes this trilogy from most other Civil War novels: He gives a balanced experience of the temperament, sensibility, and character of generals on both sides of the battle lines. Shaara also proves once and for all that, though influenced by his father, he has a voice and talent all his own.

The author spoke with BookPage from his home in Missoula, Montana.

BookPage: You strike me as a natural born writer. With no training or experience, you took up the challenge of writing Gods and Generals. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to do the job?
Jeff Shaara: From the time I tried to do it all the way through the book tour after it was published, I didn’t know. I was scared until I showed to my wife the first couple of chapters of The Last Full Measure that focus on Lee, and she said, "This proves you can do it on your own." Then I knew.

BP: Reading The Last Full Measure, I sensed that in General Grant you had discovered your own special subject.
JS: I’m glad you felt that way. I loved writing about that man. I wanted to shatter the myths about him and tell his story fully and truthfully. I liked being able to bring out the differences between Lee and Grant. People are emotional about Lee, a beloved figure, an inspiring figure. But Grant is cool and aloof, so I wanted to bring him alive for the reader. Writing about him was a little like writing about Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals — exciting, discovering the man as I tried to recreate him as a real person, not just an awesome legend. Both men were hard to get close to in life.

BP: Of all the generals in the trilogy, who is most like your father?
JS: Two men, not just one. As a man, my father was most like Joshua Chamberlain. I think my father felt an affinity with him. My father was idealistic (although he became a cynic in his later years), an intellectual, a scholarly kind of man, like Chamberlain. . . . And then the other side of my father that I was quite aware of as I wrote comes out in General Hancock. Hancock is very good at what he does. After Reynolds died, he was perhaps the greatest Union general in the field. Like Hancock, my father had no patience for incompetence, stupidly, inefficiency. You know that scene [in Gods and Generals] in the newspaper office when Hancock reaches across the desk and grabs the newspaperman by the throat? I felt my father guiding me as I wrote that scene.

BP: As you wrote Gods and Generals, did your father’s style influence your own?
JS: Definitely. How else would I have known how to write? My sister Lila said to me, "This novel is being written by the ghost of our father." But then the style changed toward the end.

BP: Like your father, Grant is a great stylist, which is partly why Hemingway declared Grant’s autobiography to be one of the masterpieces of American literature. As you wrote from Grant’s point of view in The Last Full Measure, did Grant’s style influence you?
JS: My father modeled his own style on Hemingway’s, by the way. But yes, I tried to catch the simplicity and the flow of Grant’s style when writing inside Grant’s mind, and I worked to change my style to be more appropriate to Lee when writing from his point of view.

BP: As in Gods and Generals, you continue to use your father’s background and structuring devices.
JS: Yes. A conscious decision. My wife told me that she, who didn’t know all that much about the Civil War, needed the kind of background material my father provided, and, you know, most of my readers are like her. Also, I wanted all three novels to have the same basic features.

BP: But in The Last Full Measure, I see a difference in your handling of the structure. As an omiscient author, you venture into fewer minds than you and your father did in the first two novels.
JS: I agonized over that. I worried that there might be an imbalance between Union and Confederate points of view, but I really couldn’t think of a Southern general of great enough stature or interest for me or the reader. Longstreet gets wounded and is no longer of use to Lee. Stuart gets killed. I go into their minds once only to show that everybody is fading out, leaving Lee alone. It’s subtler in General Gordon’s one chapter because he can see, as Lee cannot, the futility of opposing Grant. One by one, all the great generals go — Jackson is already dead — and Lee misses each of them. So of the Confederate generals, I decided to show Lee’s mind isolated. Lee, who was the symbol of the whole war, of the whole confederacy, is out there by himself, facing Grant.

BP: This coming July will mark the 135th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. People often ask you, I’m sure, why you think Americans are so intensely interested in an event that took place so long ago.
JS: It’s not that there is a general interest in Civil War history — the facts and figures — per se, but an interest in character, which my father helped to create and which I am trying to carry on — a demystifying effort to help the reader see that the generals are just like us. Grant and Lee didn’t start out as Grant and Lee the mythic heroes; they evolved in crisis action. It is through seeing them as like us that we truly realize how great they are.

BP: It’s always interesting to compare fictional renderings of famous people with biographies. Have you read the latest biography of Grant?
JS: No. For both novels, I didn’t want to read any of the great books by recent writers because I didn’t want to be influenced. I wanted my interpretations to be my own. I read very few books written after about 1920.

BP: I wonder whether you will someday write a novel or a memoir about your relationship with your father?
JS: Oh, yes, that’s very likely, and it’ll probably be a memoir. But in the meantime, there is this documentary movie in four parts that looks at the Union generals, the Confederate Generals, and the role of the Irish. The fourth part is a biography of Michael Shaara, and in that there is some sense of our relationship.

BP: The scenes between Mark Twain and Grant at the nnd of the novel are so appealing and moving. The two of them are like aged versions of Huck and Jim on a raft on the Mississippi River.
JS: I love this element, the contrast between the two characters. When I learned that Twain commissioned Grant to write his autobiogra1hy, I was ecstatic. Twain is such a public icon, he’s worked into Westerns, even science fiction movies, as a character. And so, yes, the parallel between Twain and Grant talking together with Huck and Jim on a raft on the Mississippi River rings true to me.

BP: The early scenes in Grant’s point of view moved me to tears, not out of sentimentality but out of appreciation for your artistic achievement. I knew then that you had demonstrated the steadfastness of your talent and that we can await, with no apprehension, your third novel. What will that one be about?
JS: It’s about the Mexican War, and I’m in the research phase. I get to write about General Scott. I love that old man.

Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War is David Madden’s 11th work of fiction.

"I hold a novel accountable for a good story," says John Irving during a conversation about A Widow for One Year, his ninth and most intricately crafted novel yet. "And by a good story, I mean one that’s a little too complicated and twisted and circumlocuitous to be easily encapsulated in a newspaper or television story."

It’s no surprise, then, that A Widow for One Year defeats easy summary. In fact, so lush and energetic is the branching and leafing of plot and subplots (which take us from Long Island in 1958, to Amsterdam’s red light district in 1990, to Vermont in 1995), and so tightly woven are the stories and stories-within- stories, that Irving and I can actually differ on what the book is really about — and both be right.

"I wanted to write about a woman’s sexual past and the choices in her sexual past that make her uncomfortable," Irving says, recalling the development of the novel’s central character, Ruth Cole. "I wanted to deliberately choose things that, were she a male, would discomfort her hardly at all. I wanted, in other words, to work on that double standard that Ruth herself is so aware of. I wanted to keep positioning Ruth vulnerably — sexually vulnerably — while giving her considerable esteem for her toughness, her work ethic, her success in her career. I wanted her to be a thinking woman and a self-critical one."

Irving also wanted to return to telling a chronological story for the first time in 15 years. "The Hotel New Hampshire and The World According to Garp were linear narratives, and I felt very strongly that I wanted to write a linear narrative again." This time, he decided to "structure the story in the manner of a play, with three distinct and separate moments of time: We see Ruth as a four-year-old girl, we see her as a 36-year-old unmarried woman — successful in her career but struggling in her relationships — and we see her five years later when she is a 41-year-old widow with a child who, not coincidentally, is the exact age Ruth was when we first met her and when her mother abandoned her."

But, Irving says, he did not hit upon the novel’s comic masterstroke — making Ruth Cole a writer — until quite late in his work on the book, until he had populated A Widow for One Year with almost everyone in it. Then, with one of those typical inventive exaggerations that endow his books with so much of their energy, Irving made almost everyone else in the book a writer, too. Ruth’s father, Ted, writes and illustrates haunting little children’s books and seduces the lonely mothers of his young models. Ruth’s mother, Marion, abandons her husband and four-year-old daughter and eventually writes well-received mystery novels in which she mourns the deaths of her two teenage sons. Marion’s 16-year-old lover, Eddie, grows up to be a good man who writes bad novels about the love between younger men and older women. Ruth’s best friend, Hannah, is a journalist who writes celebrity profiles and is lonely and sexually self-absorbed. Ruth marries an editor but falls in love with a reader.

"I wrote Garp when I was a decidedly unfamous writer and a writer who always expected to support myself by teaching and coaching," Irving says. "I’ve often found it puzzling that I wrote that book about not just one famous writer, but two — Garp and his mother — when I didn’t give being a famous writer a second thought. Once I decided to make Ruth a writer, I had a lot of fun with areas of being a writer that I didn’t know anything about when I wrote Garp. I didn’t know publishers had publicists until my fourth novel was published. I didn’t have book tours. Nobody interviewed me. The public life as a writer, which Ruth is so uncomfortable with, is something I wasn’t able to give attention to before because I hadn’t had the experience. That and Ruth’s obdurate denial that there is any truth to Hannah’s accusation that Ruth is an autobiographical writer. It is enduringly fascinating to me how simplistically that subject is treated, both by writers themselves and by people writing about writers. When the writer is any good, it’s complicated. It’s a subject I think can be fascinating — and very funny."

Of course, this barely scratches the surface of a novel whose sorrows and delights depend heavily on time and the anticipation of its passing. "From the very beginning," Irving says, "I was aware that I was writing a love story, and that it was a dual love story. It was Marion and Eddie’s love story, and it was Harry and Ruth’s love story. But I wanted that love story to feel so distant and take so long to get there, that you don’t know what it is until it’s almost over. . . . You want the reader to guess what’s going to happen next — and guess it right. But not always. You want things to happen that they don’t see coming. The balance between the two is very delicate. It has to do with the interconnectedness of people’s lives, and that has to do with plot and with carefully making a character stay true to himself or herself."

"Composing a novel," Irving concludes, "is like constructing the interior architecture of the house you live in. Other people will pass through and say, ‘Oh, it’s a nice house but what a hideous window over the kitchen table.’ Only a writer really lives in a novel. So much of what works best about it are things that people who come to dinner never know about or see."

It’s a fitting analogy. A Widow for One Year is wonderfully constructed, and its characters and their interrelationships are, indeed, even more interesting on return visits.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Many have likened novelist Anne Rivers Siddons to Margaret Mitchell, a comparison that prompts a chuckle in Siddons, the author of such blockbusters as Outer Banks, Colony, and Peachtree Road. "We don't write remotely about the same thing," Siddons says, only to reconsider, "Well, she wrote about the profound loss of one society and the need to live in another one, and I have too a little bit, but we really are not the same. I guess it's because we're both from Atlanta and we both write long books."

However, they won't be from the same city for long. In November, Siddons, her husband, and their four cats will move from Atlanta to the heart of historic Charleston, South Carolina. "It's an enormous move," Siddons admits. "I have lived in this area for seven generations and in this house for 30 years. I may end up in Prozac City. Who knows? We have lots of friends in Charleston, but it's going to be an enormous shock."

Readers can get a hearty helping of the Charleston vicinity in Siddons's latest book, a page-turner called Low Country, about the perennial war between natural beauty and coastal development.

Low Country's heroine, Caroline Venable, has one precious thing left in her life: a pristine island inherited from her grandfather. In addition to the family cottage, it's home to a small Gullah settlement, a band of wild ponies, and other wildlife, including a mysterious panther. Caroline's husband, Clay, has made a fortune developing resort communities in various locales, but when his empire faces bankruptcy, he is convinced that financial salvation lies in developing Caroline's island. For Caroline, this is unacceptable, which means she must face one of the biggest challenges of her life.

The seeds for the plot were born years ago when Siddons worked as a copywriter for the first island resort on Hilton Head, South Carolina. "I watched the land turn from almost primeval forest to what it is now, which is Manhattan South," Siddons remembers. "It isn't that any developer sets out to ruin a place, it's just that even the best and most ecologically sensitive plan requires something fragile to be lost. I have always wanted to write about this clash."

Once Siddons knew she was moving to Charleston, she began spending a lot of time in the surrounding islands, especially in the vicinity of Ace Basin. Describing the area as primeval, she says: "It's a real experience to go out on a warm summer night. You come back thinking you've been back to the dawn of the millennium. It's one of the wildest places I've ever seen. And the idea that someone might build a Disney World-type place there is just abhorrent. I really would like to do what I can to help the area stay intact."

Specifically, she applauds the efforts of a group called the Carolina Coastal Conservancy for buying and preserving large tracts of wetlands. Meanwhile, she preserves the feel of such natural treasures in her fiction, having Caroline, who has faced great tragedy in her life, find solace on her island, where she is free to relax and paint.

Ironically, when Siddons herself seeks peace, she heads north instead of south, to a peninsula on Maine's Penobscot Bay, a summer retreat that's been in her husband's family for years. "I'm very drawn to that severe, cold, rocky beach [of New England]," Siddons says, "and I'm equally drawn to that blood-warm water [of the South]. But I'm never so happy as I am on the waters of Maine. I have a sense that whatever is looming or bothersome can be put off until I get home. Also, it's physically a long way from any other entanglements I may have, so if anybody gets upset and needs to be comforted, it had better be good."

Why do islands have such prominent roles in her novels? "I think it's the idea that they're totally apart from the world," Siddons explains. "An island has some sort of magnetic pull. It makes all these promises that it will keep you safe and nurture you. Of course this is not true, but I still never sleep as soundly as I do on an island or on our little peninsula in Maine."

Caroline, like several of the author's heroines, risks losing the core of her existence. "I think my heroines will always be ordinary women who have made a journey," Siddons says. "Maybe it doesn't happen so totally and drastically to most of us, but I haven't seen many women fall into middle age without losing something that has always been a very important part of their lives, and either having to make a life around that, or find a way to go on, or change in order to go on. It seems to me that women are left to do the changing and accommodating."

Siddons's own transforming journey occurred 15 years ago, when she battled severe depression that lasted three years, leaving her unable to write. "It was mostly a matter of brain chemistry, but I didn't know what it was. It was totally crippling. I could hardly exist. We finally found a drug that worked and a wonderful woman therapist. It felt like one of those things you either survive or you don't — there aren't too many in-betweens."

Finally, she had an idea for a book, and slowly, hesitantly, began to write. "If I couldn't write, it would have killed me," she says, "but I had to try." The result was Homeplace, followed by a string of additional bestsellers.

Siddons has not only survived, but flourished. She excitedly talks about the prospect of moving into the antique Charleston single house, which is one room wide, two stories high, and about eight rooms deep. "The idea of living in a city with that kind of resonance and beauty is so exciting," she muses. "I feel spoiled to be able to keep that much of everything I love about the South. It's like a fairy tale."

Alice Cary writes from her home in Groton, Massachusetts.