Shelby Foote was an American historian and novelist. He was
born on November 7, 1916 in Greenville, Mississippi, and attended
school there until he entered the University of North Carolina.
During World War II he served as a captain of field artillery but
never saw combat. After World War II he worked briefly for the
Associated Press in their New York bureau. In 1953 he moved to
Memphis, where he lived for the remainder of his life.
Foote was the author of six novels: Tournament, Follow Me
Down, Love in a Dry Season, Shiloh, Jordan
County, and September, September. He is best remembered
for his 3-volume history The Civil War: A Narrative, which
took twenty years to complete and resulted in his being a featured
expert in Ken Burns' acclaimed PBS documentary, "The Civil War".
Over the course of his writing career, Foote was also awarded three
Guggenheim fellowships.
Shelby Foote died in 2005 at the age of 88.
"This, then, is narrative history—a kind of history that goes back
to an older literary tradition.... The writing is superb...one of
the historical and literary achievements of our time." —The
Washington Post Book World
" Mr. Foote has an acute sense of the relative importance of events
and a novelist's skill in directing the reader's attention to the
men and the episodes that will influence the course of the whole
war, without omitting items which are of momentary interest. His
organization of facts could hardly be better." —Atlantic
"Though the events of this middle year of the Civil War have been
recounted hundreds of times, they have rarely been re-created with
such vigor and such picturesque detail." —The New York Times Book
Review
"The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the
strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the
fighting, are all controlled by constant sense of how it happened
and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist's feeling for
character and situation, without losing the historian's scrupulous
regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand
unequaled." —Walter Mills
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