Marching to Valhalla: A Novel of Custer's Last Days

Michael Blake

Villard, 1996 - Fiction - 288 pages

In Marching to Valhalla, Blake turns his storyteller's eye on George Armstrong Custer, West Pointer, youngest Union general of the Civil War, horseman, passionate lover, explorer, ardent husband, and, most famously, Indian hunter. In Blake's pages, Custer emerges as a dashing, driven soldier, suspicious of his friends, respectful of his enemies, and ever unable to feel quite alive in the civilian world. Composed in the form of Custer's journal, Marching to Valhalla is an impeccable merging of fact and fiction, a powerful evocation of our bloody past, and a tribute to the endurance of a human heart facing adversity and disaster. A masterpiece of the Old West, Michael Blake's novel is a tragic romance that reveals a Custer never before imagined, and lets us finally contemplate the twisting, uncharted paths to glory and doom.

Contents

• Section 1: 3
• Section 2: 6
• Section 3: 20

About the author

Michael Blake was born Michael Lennox Webb in Fort Bragg, North Carolina on July 5, 1945. He joined the Air Force and was assigned to the public information office and began writing for the base newspaper. He attended the University of New Mexico before going to film school at the University of California, Berkeley. One of his first screenplays, Stacy's Knights, was produced in 1983 and starred Kevin Costner. He continued to write scripts for the next several years, but nothing he wrote made it to the screen. After reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, Blake had the idea for Dances with Wolves. Costner suggested he write a book instead of a screenplay. The book was published in 1988. Blake had just lost his job as a dishwasher when Costner asked him to adapt his own novel into a screenplay. The Dances with Wolves film was released in 1990. Blake received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His other novels included Airman Mortensen and The Holy Road. He died from heart failure on May 2, 2015 at the age of 69.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Marching to Valhalla: A Novel of Custer's Last Days
• Author: Michael Blake
• Publisher: Villard, 1996
• ISBN: 0679448640, 9780679448648
• Length: 288 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Fantasy / Historical; Fiction / General; Fiction / Historical / General; Fiction / Westerns