Shelby Foote Popular Books

Shelby Foote Biography & Facts

Shelby Dade Foote Jr. (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) was an American writer, historian and journalist. Although he primarily viewed himself as a novelist, he is now best known for his authorship of The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the American Civil War. With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. 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. While Foote's work was mostly well-received during his lifetime, it has been criticized by professional historians and academics in the 21st century. Early life Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the son of Shelby Dade Foote and his wife Lillian (née Rosenstock). Foote's paternal grandfather, Huger Lee Foote (1854–1915), a planter, had gambled away most of his fortune and assets. His paternal great-grandfather, Hezekiah William Foote (1813–99), was an American Confederate veteran, attorney, planter and state politician from Mississippi. His maternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna. Foote was raised in his father's and maternal grandmother's Episcopal faith, though he attended synagogue each Saturday with his mother until the age of eleven. As his father advanced through the executive ranks of Armour and Company, the family lived in Greenville, Jackson, and Vicksburg, Mississippi, as well as Pensacola, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama. Foote's father died in Mobile when Foote was five years old; he and his mother moved back to Greenville to live with her sister's family. Foote was an only child, and his mother never remarried. When Foote was 15 years old, he began what would become lifelong friendships with Walker Percy and his brothers LeRoy and Phinizy Percy who'd just moved into Greenville to live with their uncle – attorney, poet, and novelist William Alexander Percy – after the death of their parents. Foote began a lifelong fraternal and literary relationship with Walker; each had great influence on the other's writing. Other influences on Foote's writing were Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon and Proust. Foote would later recall that Greenville fitted with Southern stereotypes "in some fairly superficial ways and departed from them in the most important ways", noting that "There was never a lynching in Greenville; it never got swept off its feet that way. The Ku Klux Klan never made any headway, at a time when it was making headway almost everywhere else." Despite Foote's citation, Greenville was the site of at least one lynching some 30 years before Foote's time there, when in 1903, John Dennis, a black man, was accused of raping a white woman and was lynched by some white citizens of Greenville. According to EJI, at least 13 lynchings took place in Washington County, of which Greenville is the county seat, between 1877 and 1950. Foote edited The Pica, the student newspaper of Greenville High School, and frequently used the paper to lampoon the school's principal. In 1935, Foote applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hoping to join with the older Percy boys, but was initially denied admission because of an unfavorable recommendation from his high school principal. He presented himself for admission anyway, and as result of a round of admissions tests, he was accepted. In 1936, he was initiated in the Alpha Delta chapter of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. Interested more in the process of learning than in earning a degree, Foote was not a model student. He often skipped class to explore the library, and once he even spent the night among the shelves. He also began contributing pieces of fiction to Carolina Magazine, UNC's award-winning literary journal. Foote returned to Greenville in 1937, where he worked in construction and for a local newspaper, The Delta Democrat Times. Around this time, he began to work on his first novel. Foote's Jewish heritage led him to experience discrimination at Chapel Hill, an experience that led to his later support for the Civil Rights Movement. In 1940, Foote joined the Mississippi National Guard and was commissioned as captain of artillery. After being transferred from one stateside base to another, his battalion was deployed to Northern Ireland in 1943. The following year, Foote was charged with falsifying a government document relating to the check-in of a motor pool vehicle he had borrowed to visit a girlfriend in Belfast, Teresa Lavery—later his first wife—who lived two miles beyond the official military limits. He was court-martialed and dismissed from the army. Foote and Lavery divorced while she was living with his mother in New Orleans, after he sent her to the U.S. on a warship convoy. After the war, Lavery married Kermit Beahan, the Nagasaki atomic bomb bombardier, in Roswell, New Mexico. Foote came back to the United States and took a job with the Associated Press in New York City. In January 1945, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps but was discharged as a private in November 1945, never having seen combat. Foote returned to Greenville and took a job with a local radio station, but he spent most of his time writing. He sent a section from his first novel to The Saturday Evening Post. "Flood Burial" was published in 1946, and when Foote received a $750 check from the Post as payment, he quit his job to write full-time. Novelist Foote's first novel, Tournament, was published in 1949. It was inspired by his planter grandfather, who had died two years before Foote's birth. For his next novel, Follow Me Down (1950), Foote drew heavily from the proceedings of a Greenville murder trial he attended in 1941 for both the plot and characters. Love in a Dry Season was his attempt to deal with the "so-called upper classes of the Mississippi Delta" around the time of the Great Depression. Foote often expressed great affection for this novel, which was published in 1951. In Shiloh (1952) Foote foreshadows his use of historical narrative as he tells the story of the bloodiest battle in American history to that point from the first-person perspective of seven different characters. The narrative is presented by 17 characters – Confederate soldiers Metcalf, Dade, and Polly; and Union soldiers Fountain, Flickner, with each of the twelve named soldiers in the Indiana squad given one section of that chapter. A close reading of this work reveals a very complete interlocked picture of the characters connecting with each other (Union with Union, Confederate with Confederate). The novel quickly sold 6,000 copies and received critical acclaim from reviewers. Later assessments from academic h.... Discover the Shelby Foote popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Shelby Foote books.