Michael Shaara was teaching creative writing at Florida State University while writing The Rebel in Autumn. He'd already published most of his 44 short stories (mainly science fiction), and his first novel, The Broken Place, was published to great literary acclaim but few sales. Based on an event at Florida State, Rebel was written during the campus protests of the late 1960s. His agent began shopping the book in 1970, just a few short months before the Ohio National Guard shot into a crowd of student protesters at Kent State University, killing four, in an eerie echo of Rebel's climactic scen...