The Rebel in Autumn

"The rebel in spring is a sometime thing, but beware the rebel in autumn," states the epigraph to Michael Shaara's great unpublished novel, The Rebel in Autumn. The year is 1969. Unrest on college campuses peaks, students drop out and protest everything from Vietnam to police brutality while conservatives push back. At one small southern university, a story censored from the literary magazine is the match that sets the tinder box ablaze. There's a simple solution, argues history...
More Description

"The rebel in spring is a sometime thing, but beware the rebel in autumn," states the epigraph to Michael Shaara's great unpublished novel, The Rebel in Autumn. The year is 1969. Unrest on college campuses peaks, students drop out and protest everything from Vietnam to police brutality while conservatives push back. At one small southern university, a story censored from the literary magazine is the match that sets the tinder box ablaze. There's a simple solution, argues history prof Max Rainer--just publish the story and move on. Rainer has more important things on his mind, like his 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. Locke--an undistinguished administrator at the end of his career--has misread the mood of the students, where unrest lies 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 adviser 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, the fires start and the National Guard is called in. Rainer tries to keep the peace. 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 43 years, The Rebel in Autumn is published for the first time anywhere, ready to take its place as one of the great works of American fiction.