The Civil War a Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian
(This second volume in Shelby Foote's masterfully written ...)
This second volume in Shelby Foote's masterfully written history of the Civil War is dominated by the almost continual confrontation of great armies. The Army of the Potomac under Burnside attempts once again to take Richmond, resulting in the bloodbath at Fredericksburg. Then Joe Hooker tries again, only to be repulsed at Chancellorsville as Stonewall Jackson turns his flank - a bitter victory for the South, paid for by the death of Lee's foremost lieutenant.
The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (Vintage Civil War Library)
("An unparalleled achievement, an American Iliad, a unique...)
"An unparalleled achievement, an American Iliad, a unique work uniting the scholarship of the historian and the high readability of the first-class novelist." âWalker Percy
"I have never read a better, more vivid, more understandable account of the savage battling between Grant's and Lee's armies.... Foote stays with the human strife and suffering, and unlike most Southern commentators, he does not take sides. In objectivity, in range, in mastery of detail in beauty of language and feeling for the people involved, this work surpasses anything else on the subject.... It stands alongside the work of the best of them." âNew Republic
"Foote is a novelist who temporarily abandoned fiction to apply the novelist's shaping hand to history: his model is not Thucydides but The Iliad, and his story, innocent of notes and formal bibliography, has a literary design. Not by accident...but for cathartic effect is so much space given to the war's unwinding, it's final shudders and convulsions.... To read this chronicle is an awesome and moving experience. History and literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here; one finishes this volume convinced that no one need undertake this particular enterprise again." âNewsweek
"The most written-about war in history has, with this completion of Shelby Foote's trilogy, been given the epic treatment it deserves." âProvidence Journal
('Tournament' is Shelby Foote's first novel, published ori...)
'Tournament' is Shelby Foote's first novel, published originally by Dial Press in 1949. Summa's reprint includes an exclusive preface by the author concerning his literary deveopment and the genesis of 'Tournament' and an introduction by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., the dean of American literature criticism. 'Tournament' is a brilliant novel of the post-Civil War South, replete with Proustian and Faulknerian overtones. Many of the characters that appear in subsequent novels by Shelby Foote come onto the scene for the first time in this work. It is a must acquisition for every fan of Shelby Foote.
(A 3-volume, softcover set of books by Shelby Foote dealin...)
A 3-volume, softcover set of books by Shelby Foote dealing with the Civil War. Volume I is titled "Fort Sumter to Perryville." Volume II is titled "Fredericksburg to Meridian." Volume III is titled "Red River to Appomattox."
(Shelby Foote's monumental historical trilogy, "The Civil ...)
Shelby Foote's monumental historical trilogy, "The Civil War: A Narrative," is our window into the day-by-day unfolding of our nation's defining event. Now Foote reveals the deeper human truth behind the battles and speeches through the fiction he has chosen for this vivid, moving collection.
These ten stories of the Civil War give us the experience of joining a coachload of whores left on a siding during a battle in Virginia . . .marching into an old man's house to tell him it's about to be burned down . . .or seeing a childhood friend shot down at Chickamauga.
The result is history that lives again in our imagination, as the creative vision of these great writers touches our emotions and makes us witness to the human tragedy of this war, fought so bravely by those in blue and gray.
The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862-July 1863 (Modern Library)
(The companion volume to Stars in Their Courses, this marv...)
The companion volume to Stars in Their Courses, this marvelous account of Grant's siege of the Mississippi port of Vicksburg continues Foote's narrative of the great battles of the Civil War--culled from his massive three-volume history--recounting a campaign which Lincoln called "one of the most brilliant in the world."
Shelby Dade Foote Jr. was an American historian and novelist who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the American Civil War.
Background
Shelby Foote was born November 17, 1916, in Greenville, Mississippi, to Shelby Dade Foote, a business executive, and Lillian (Rosenstock) Foote. His father came from a long line of illustrious Mississippians. One of his ancestors, Isaac Shelby, was a frontier leader during the American Revolution and the first governor of Kentucky. His great-grandfather, Captain Hezekiah William Foote, fought for the Confederacy at Shiloh and went on to become a judge. His grandfather, Huger Lee Foote, was a Washington County planter who gambled away what would have been a substantial inheritance. His son, Shelby's father, was employed as an executive with Armour and Company. He died in 1922, when his son was almost six years old. There were no other children. His mother never remarried.
Education
In a September 11, 1994, Booknotes television interview with C-SPAN's Brian Lamb, Foote claimed that he was frequently in trouble during his childhood. As editor of his high school paper, for example, he dedicated himself to "giving the principal a hard time. " According to Foote, the principal retaliated by urging the University of North Carolina to reject his application. This was in 1935--when there were few students--and the university relented. Although he enjoyed studying English and history and writing short stories and poetry for the campus literary magazine, he ignored mathematics and other courses that bored him. Foote left college in 1937 without earning a degree.
In 1992 Foote received an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina.
Career
Between 1935 and 1939, he worked on an intermittent basis for Hodding Carter's Delta Star, which became the Delta Democrat-Times. Carter often chided Foote for writing fiction instead of tending to his newspaper responsibilities. In October 1939, Foote joined the Mississippi National Guard and, with the mobilization of his unit the following year, became a sergeant in the regular United States Army. After the United States entered World War II, he was sent to Europe, where he served as a battery commander of field artillery, rising to the rank of captain. His army career ended abruptly, however, when he was dismissed by court-martial in Ireland after traveling two miles beyond the official limit to see his girlfriend. He returned to the United States and worked on a local desk of the Associated Press for about six months before joining the Marine Corps. He was in the Corps for a year as an enlisted man assigned to combat intelligence, but the war ended before he was shipped overseas. Kindred Souls Foote did not begin writing about the Civil War until 1954, when he was about 37 years old. His fascination with the subject began when he was growing up in Greenville, Mississippi. One of his best friends was Walker Percy, who became a novelist and essayist. Walker's uncle and guardian, William Alexander Percy, had a profound influence on the boys. "He was the greatest teacher I have ever known, because he thought about books and talked about them in a way that made you want to read them, " Foote said in a July 6, 1982, interview in the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion Ledger. In 1931, Percy began his writing career as gossip columnist for the Greenville (Mississippi) High School Pica. His first item was about the "desperate affair" of his best friend, "G. H. S. 's own playboy, Shelby Foote. " The friendship survived Percy's adolescent wisecracks and Foote's later criticism of Percy for his religiosity. It survived, in fact, for six decades. Their correspondence is contained in The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. Following his discharge from the Marine Corps in November of 1945, Foote worked as a construction worker, as a copywriter for a radio station in Memphis, Tennessee, and as a reporter for the Delta-Times Democrat. In 1946, Foote sold his first short story to the Saturday Evening Post, and he returned with renewed vigor to the novel he had begun while still in the army. One publisher after another rejected it. After being rewritten, he eventually sold it to Dial Press. Published as Tournament in 1949, the novel is a character study of a Delta planter who gambles away the family fortune (much as his own grandfather had done). It was greeted by critics as a promising first novel. In his second novel, Follow Me Down (1950), Foote used multiple points of view to unfold the story of a fanatically religious Mississippi farmer who murders a teenage girl for whom he has abandoned his wife and family. Critics acknowledged Foote's talents but criticized the repetition of events as seen through the eyes of eight characters. Civil War Studies In Shiloh (1952), his first historical novel, Foote described the chaos of this 1862 Civil War battle through the eyes of several soldiers from both the Union and the Confederacy. Foote's Jordan County was published in 1954. It consists of seven stories taking place in reverse chronological order from 1950 to 1797. In December 1953, Foote left Greenville to settle in Memphis, Tennessee. There he began researching and writing a history of the Civil War. The project began with an invitation from Bennett Cerf of Random House to prepare a brief history of the Civil War. "I didn't think a summary would hold my interest, but I told Mr. Cerf I was willing to go whole hog and do a three-part thing on it, " he said in a 1990 interview with People magazine. "There was silence for about a week, and then he wrote back and said to go ahead. I thought it would take me about three years, but it took me 20. " He spent a decade on the 1, 100-page third volume alone. The trilogy was widely praised for enticing the reader into the sectional conflict with its vivid imagery and strong characterization. Some academics, however, deprecate The Civil War as the work of a college dropout. They found its absence of footnotes appalling and pointed out that Foote had ignored the causes of the war and had provided only a sketchy political, diplomatic, or economic background. He was also criticized for relying too heavily on secondary sources. He does, however, claim to have based his research on no fewer than 350 books on the Civil War, all of which are in his personal library. He claims to have read each and every one. The first volume, The Civil War: A Narrative: Fort Sumter to Perryville, was published by Random House in 1958. Other volumes in the trilogy include Fredericksburg to Meridian, published in 1963, and Red River to Appomattox, published in 1974. Return to Fiction After devoting 20 years of his life to the four-year Civil War, Foote returned to fiction with September, September (1978), in which a group of whites plot to kidnap a black child for ransom. The drama takes place in a 30-day period in 1957 and is played against the background of white resistance to racial integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. Adapted for television, September, September was retitled Memphis. Civil War Documentary In 1985, Foote received a call from Ken Burns, a documentary-film maker whom he admired for his treatment of the life of the former governor of Louisiana and senator Huey Long. Burns invited Foote to be part of the Civil War documentary he was preparing for the Public Broadcasting Service. Upon meeting Foote, Burns was soon moved to make him "the presiding spirit" of the documentary. "He provides the painful recollection of the South's loss without any of the old animosity and the old excuses, " Burns said in an October 15, 1990, People magazine interview. Fourteen million Americans discovered Shelby Foote in the fall of 1990, when he appeared as the principal guide through the hugely successful 11-hour PBS Civil War series. The appearance turned him into a video folk hero, and he has been in much demand for public appearances ever since. For a man who had always jealously guarded his privacy, the sudden attention was disruptive. Foote told People magazine: "I'm looking forward to when my fifteen minutes of Andy Warhol fame are over. What I do requires steady work and isolation from all this hoorah. " Foote told Margaret Carlin of the Scripts-Howard News Service: "I've got to have quiet time, because I'm slow. .. . I compose with a dip pen--the kind that used to be in the post office. I studied German, so I write in that kind of Gothic script. Using that kind of pen slows me down so I can get my thoughts right. Then I type the manuscript on big 10-by-14-inch yellow sheets, making changes as I go. " A Sin As Great As Slavery Foote believes that the conflict that ended in 1865 still has a bearing on our lives. "It was the last great romantic war and the first horrendous modern war, " he told People magazine. "It fascinates us because it is still the central event of our history. So many of the questions that still plague us, particularly concerning race relations and the power of central government, can be better understood if we see how they arose and how we attempted to solve them. " In the August 1996 issue of Smithsonian Magazine Foote is quoted as saying: "Right now I'm thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery. Another was emancipation. It's a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy--and it was. But the way it was done led to tragedy. Turning four million people loose with no jobs or trades or learning. And then, in 1877, for a few electoral votes, just abandoning them entirely. A huge amount of pain and trouble resulted. Everybody in America is still paying for it. " Foote told the Lexington Herald-Leader in a 1997 interview: "I learned to love my country, in two ways. I began to learn the geography of the South--the mountains, the rivers, the valleys. The other thing was the incredible heroism on both sides. It's hard to believe men were as brave as those men were. Somehow sense of honor was stronger than fear. God knows, they felt fear. I would really like it to be stressed that my work helped me to love my country. I hope my work does that for other people, learning both our virtues and our vices. "
On September 2, 2001, Shelby Foote was the focus of the C-SPAN television program In-Depth. In a 3-hour interview, conducted by C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb, Foote shows off the library of his home, working room, and writing desk, and details the writing of his books as well as taking on-air calls.
Foote died at Baptist Hospital in Memphis on June 27, 2005, aged 88. He had had a heart attack after a recent pulmonary embolism. He was interred in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. His grave is beside the family plot of General Forrest.
Achievements
Foote was little known to the general public until his appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990, where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was "central to all our lives. " Foote did all his writing by hand with a nib pen, later transcribing the result into a typewritten copy.
In 2003 Foote received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust. He also received the 1992 St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates.
Foote professed to be a reluctant celebrity. When The Civil War was first broadcast, his telephone number was publicly listed and he received many phone calls from people who had seen him on television.
Quotations:
"People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does. "
"If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D. H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing. "
"When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking. "
"As a Southerner I would have to say that one of the main importances of the War is that Southerners have a sense of defeat which none of the rest of the country has. "
"I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something. "
"I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process. "
"I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper. "
"Generally the first week in September brings the hottest weather of the year, and this was no exception. Overhead the fans turned slow, their paddle blades stirring the air up close to the ceiling but nowheres else. .. "
Connections
In 1944 he married his Irish girlfriend, Tess Lavery. In1948 he married Marguerite "Peggy" Desommes. Together they had a child. In 1956 he married Gwyn Rainer. They also have their child.
