A short life of the author
Shelby Dade Foote Jr. (17 November 1916 – 27 June 2005) was an American historian and novelist who devoted twenty years of his life to writing The Civil War: A Narrative (1958–1974), a three-volume, 1.2-million-word history of the American Civil War that is universally regarded as the greatest narrative history of the conflict and one of the supreme achievements of American literary non-fiction. The work is not a conventional academic history — Foote held no advanced degree and conducted no archival research in the traditional sense — but a work of narrative art: a story told with the techniques of the novelist, drawing on the vast documentary record of the war to create a panoramic account that is simultaneously comprehensive in its military coverage and vivid in its human detail.
Life
Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi, into a family with deep roots in the Mississippi Delta. He grew up in the same town as Walker Percy (they were boyhood friends), attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill without graduating, and served briefly in the Army during World War II (he was discharged for a fraudulent enlistment — he had been too young to serve when he first enlisted — and later served in Marine combat intelligence).
He published five novels in the 1950s — Tournament (1949), Follow Me Down (1950), Love in a Dry Season (1951), Shiloh (1952), and Jordan County (1954) — that established him as a talented Southern novelist in the tradition of Faulkner. But the work that consumed the rest of his professional life was the Civil War narrative, which he began in 1954.
The Civil War: A Narrative (1958–1974)
The three volumes — Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963), and Red River to Appomattox (1974) — cover the entire war from the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861 to the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865. Foote wrote the entire work in longhand, with a dip pen, at a rate of approximately 500 words per day — a method he described as necessary for the kind of prose he wanted to achieve.
The narrative’s method is essentially novelistic: Foote follows the campaigns and battles from multiple perspectives, shifting between the Union and Confederate commands, rendering the physical terrain with a precision that allows the reader to visualise the geography of each engagement, and building portraits of the commanders — Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Sherman, Jackson, Longstreet, Forrest — that are as vivid as the characters in any novel.
The greatest passages are the battle narratives: Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, the March to the Sea. Foote makes these enormously complex military operations comprehensible and dramatic without simplifying them — a feat of narrative art that no other Civil War historian has matched.
Shiloh (1952)
Before the narrative history, Foote wrote a short novel about the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862) told from the perspectives of six soldiers — three Confederate, three Union — that is one of the finest American war novels. The book demonstrated the narrative techniques that Foote would deploy on a vastly larger scale in the history.
Ken Burns and Fame
Foote became a national celebrity through his appearances in Ken Burns’s nine-episode documentary The Civil War (1990), which was watched by over 40 million viewers. Foote’s commentary — delivered in a honeyed Mississippi voice with a storyteller’s sense of pacing and detail — was the documentary’s most memorable element. His anecdotes about Nathan Bedford Forrest, his account of the closing of the war, and his tears when speaking of the conflict’s human cost made him, at age seventy-three, the most famous historian in America.
Foote and Percy
Foote’s lifelong friendship with Walker Percy is one of the great literary friendships in American letters. They grew up together in Greenville, Mississippi, influenced each other’s work, and maintained a correspondence that lasted decades. Their letters, published as The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy (1996), reveal two brilliant minds engaged in sustained dialogue about literature, philosophy, race, and the meaning of Southern identity — a dialogue all the more valuable because Foote the novelist-historian and Percy the novelist-philosopher approached these questions from fundamentally different angles.
Critical Questions
Foote’s work has been criticised for its relative inattention to slavery as the cause of the war, for its sympathetic treatment of Confederate generals (particularly Forrest, who was a slave trader and Ku Klux Klan leader), and for its old-fashioned emphasis on military operations rather than social, economic, and racial history. These criticisms have gained force since the reckoning with Confederate monuments and Lost Cause mythology. They do not diminish the literary achievement of the narrative, but they make it impossible to read uncritically.
Collecting Foote
The Civil War: A Narrative in first edition (Random House): Volume I (1958) brings $200–$600; Volume II (1963) brings $100–$300; Volume III (1974) brings $100–$300. The complete set in first editions is a prized item. Shiloh (1952, Dial Press) brings $100–$300. Signed copies are available — Foote was generous with signings — and command moderate premiums.