Shelby Foote - WikiHQ

Shelby Dade Foote Jr. (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) was an American writer 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.

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. His maternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna.

Foote was raised in his father's Episcopal faith. He also sometimes attended synagogue as a child, but says he "never felt Jewish."

Foote moved frequently as his father was promoted within Armour and Company, living in Greenville, Jackson, and Vicksburg, Mississippi; Pensacola, Florida; and Mobile, Alabama. When Foote was five, his father died in Mobile, and his mother moved them back to Greenville. When Foote was 15 years old, he began lifelong friendships with Walker Percy and his brothers LeRoy and Phinizy. Foote and Percy influenced each other greatly. Additional influences on Foote's writing were Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon, Proust, and Percy's uncle and adoptive father William Alexander Percy.

At Greenville High School, Foote edited the student newspaper, The Pica, and frequently used it to lampoon the school's principal, who in turn exacted revenge by recommending that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill not admit Foote in 1935. Foote was able to gain admission only by passing a round of admission tests.

In 1940, Foote joined the Mississippi National Guard and was commissioned as captain of artillery. 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 vehicle he borrowed to visit his girlfriend in Belfast. He was court-martialed and dismissed from the service.

Foote got 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 without seeing combat. He also mined the primary sources in the 128-volume Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. He developed new respect for such disparate figures as Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Patrick Cleburne, Edwin Stanton, and Jefferson Davis. By contrast, he grew to dislike such figures as Philip Sheridan and Joseph E. Johnston. To heighten the storytelling of his book, Foote eschewed footnotes.

During the project, Foote lived off two Guggenheim Fellowships (1955–1960), Ford Foundation grants, and loans from Walker Percy.

Foote was criticized for his lack of interest in more current historical research, and for a less firm grasp of politics than of military affairs. John F. Marszalek praised Foote's grasp of military history, "Twenty years of dedicated labor have resulted in a literary masterpiece which places Shelby Foote among those very few historians who are authors of major syntheses...this history will long stand with the volumes of Bruce Catton as the final word on the military history of the Civil War."

In 1993, Richard N. Current argued that Foote too often depended on a single source for lifelike details, but "probably is as accurate as most historians...Foote's monumental narrative most likely will continue to be read and remembered as a classic of its kind." Academic historians routinely lament Foote's lack of citations.

Eric Foner and Leon Litwack felt Foote underplayed the extent of Southern white racism, treating "white southerners" as synonymous with all "southerners." Litwack concluded that "Foote is an engaging battlefield guide, a master of the anecdote, and a gifted and charming story teller, but he is not a good historian." Joshua M. Zeitz described Foote as "living proof that many Americans...remain under the spell of a century-old tendency to mystify the Confederacy's martial glory at the expense of recalling the intense ideological purpose associated with its cause...we remain very much under the spell of Robert E. Lee, even as we decry slavery and its legacy."

In a 1997 interview, Foote stated that he would have fought for the Confederacy, "What's more, I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar...States' rights is not just a theoretical excuse for oppressing people. You have to understand that the raggedy Confederate soldier who owned no slaves and probably couldn't even read the Constitution, let alone understand it, when he was captured by Union soldiers and asked, 'What are you fighting for?' replied, 'I'm fighting because you're down here.' So I certainly would have fought to keep people from invading my native state." He suggested the general had tried to prevent the massacre, despite evidence to the contrary. Foote also compared Forrest to John Keats and Abraham Lincoln.

Foote argued, "the French Maquis did far worse things than the Ku Klux Klan ever did—who never blew up trains or burnt bridges or anything else," and that the First Klan "didn't even have lynchings." In 1986, Foote strongly denounced the NAACP's campaign to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest Monument in Memphis, "the day that black people admire Forrest as much as I do is the day when they will be free and equal, for they will have gotten prejudice out of their minds as we whites are trying to get it out of ours." Speaking in 1989, Foote stated that "this black separatist movement is a bunch of junk," believing that African-Americans should model themselves on Jews, who Foote believed had a talent for making money. Foote, however, believed "the odds against" black people were to be "too great" for them to succeed in the US, as a result of "having a different color skin."

Later life

After finishing September, September, Foote resumed work on Two Gates to the City, the novel he had set aside in 1954 to write the Civil War trilogy. The work still gave him trouble and he set it aside once more, in the summer of 1978, to write "Echoes of Shiloh," an article for National Geographic Magazine. By 1981, he had given up on Two Gates altogether, though he told interviewers for years afterward that he continued to work on it.

In the late 1980s, Ken Burns had assembled a group of consultants to interview for his Civil War documentary. Foote was not in this initial group, though Burns had Foote's trilogy on his reading list. A phone call from Robert Penn Warren prompted Burns to contact Foote. Burns and crew traveled to Memphis in 1986 to film an interview with Foote in the anteroom of his study. In November 1986, Foote figured prominently at a meeting of dozens of consultants gathered to critique Burns' script. Burns interviewed Foote on-camera in Memphis and Vicksburg in 1987. That same year, he became a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The Civil War historian Judkin Browning has noted that Foote's outspoken praise of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the documentary ensured "Lost Causers raised their beer mugs in salute while historians hurled their lagers at their televisions." Foote has been further criticized for repeating "plainly wrong" Lost Cause tropes in his commentary, particularly over the issue of apparently "overwhelming" Northern industrial advantage and his downplaying of the role of slavery in causing the Civil War.

thumb|Foote's longtime home at 542 East Parkway South in Memphis

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. Foote never unlisted his number, and the volume of calls increased each time the series re-aired.

In 1992, Foote received an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina. In the early 1990s, Foote was interviewed by journalist Tony Horwitz for a project on American memory of the Civil War that Horwitz eventually published as Confederates in the Attic (1998). Foote was also a member of The Modern Library's editorial board for the re-launch of the series in the mid-1990s; this series published two books excerpted from his Civil War narrative. Foote also contributed a long introduction to their edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, giving a narrative biography of the author. He also received the 1992 St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates.

Foote was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. Also in 1994, Foote joined Protect Historic America and was instrumental in opposing a Disney theme park near battlefield sites in Virginia. Foote emphasized that his loyalties during the 1860s would have been to Southerners: "I’d be with my people, right or wrong." Foote also argued that freedmen had led to the failure of Reconstruction and that the Confederate flag represented "law, honour, love of country."

On September 2, 2001, he was the focus of the C-SPAN television program In-Depth. In a three-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 and emails.

Foote campaigned in the 2001 referendum on the Flag of Mississippi, arguing against a proposal which would have replaced the Confederate battle flag with a blue canton with 20 stars. Foote rejected the Confederate flag's association with white supremacy and argued "I’m for the Confederate flag always and forever. Many among the finest people this country has ever produced died in that war. To take it and call it a symbol of evil is a misrepresentation."

In 2003, Foote received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

Foote died at Baptist Hospital in Memphis on June 27, 2005, aged 88. He suffered a heart attack following a pulmonary embolism. He was interred in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. His grave is beside the family plot of General Forrest.

Legacy

In 2013, the Sons of Confederate Veterans protested the removal of Nathan Bedford Forrest's statue in Memphis by invoking Foote's characterization of him as a "humane slave holder."

thumb|250px|Shelby Foote historical marker, Greenville, Mississippi (2019)

In 2017, the conservative writer Bill Kauffman, writing in The American Conservative, argued for a revival of Foote's sympathetic portrayal of the South. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Kelly's controversial remarks by citing Foote's work.

On October 18, 2019, a Mississippi Writers Trail historical marker was installed in Greenville, Mississippi, to honor Foote's literary and historical contributions.

Publications

Fiction

Tournament (1949)
Follow Me Down (1950)
Love in a Dry Season (1951)
Shiloh: A Novel (1952)
Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative (1954)
September, September (1978)

The Civil War: A Narrative

The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958)
The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963)
The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol 3: Red River to Appomattox (1974)

Titles excerpted from The Civil War: A Narrative

Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, June–July 1863
The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862 – July 1863

These two books published by the Modern Library are excerpted from the three-volume narrative. The former was a whole chapter in the second volume, and the latter excerpted from the second volume where some material was interspersed with other events. Both were also presented as unabridged audio books read by the author.

Other

Foote edited a modern edition of Chickamauga And Other Civil War Stories (previously published as The Night Before Chancellorsville And Other Civil War Stories), an anthology of Civil War stories by various authors.
Foote contributed a lengthy introduction to the 1993 Modern Library edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (which was published along with "The Veteran," a short story that features the hero of the larger work at the end of his life). In this introduction, Foote recounts the biography of Crane in the same narrative style as Foote's Civil War work.
Foote collaborated with his wife's cousin, photographer Nell Dickerson, to produce the book Gone: A Photographic Plea for Preservation. Dickerson used Foote's story "Pillar of Fire," from his 1954 novel Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative, as the text to illustrate her photographs of southern antebellum buildings in ruins.

In popular culture

Foote's distinctive Southern accent was the model for Daniel Craig's character in the 2019 film Knives Out.

References

Notes

Primary sources

Tolson, Jay, ed. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy (W.W. Norton Company, 1997).

External links

"Shelby Foote Collection" Rhodes College, Memphis
Shelby Foote Papers Inventory, in the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill
PBS Civil War
American Enterprise interview with Bill Kauffman
Ole Miss biography and obituary
Fellowship of Southern Writers biography
Reprint of a letter from Foote to William Faulkner, Meridian, Issue 17, University of Virginia
Shelby Foote Collection (MUM00187) owned by the University of Mississippi.
In Depth interview with Foote, September 2, 2001