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.
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) was a planter who gambled away most of his assets. His paternal great-grandfather was Hezekiah William Foote (1813–1899), an American Confederate veteran, attorney, planter and politician from Mississippi. 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."Shelby Foote, Historian and Novelist, Dies at 88", The New York Times, June 29, 2005
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 1936, Foote was rejected from the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity due to his Jewish background. He was able to be initiated in the Alpha Delta chapter of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity initially but would later be expelled once his background was uncovered. He often skipped class to explore the library, even spending a night among the shelves. He 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. During Foote's time at Chapel Hill, his Jewish heritage led to discrimination, an experience that bolstered his later support for the Civil Rights Movement.
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.
Foote returned to Greenville and took a job with a local radio station. He spent most of his time writing and submitted part of his first novel to The Saturday Evening Post. When the Post published "Flood Burial" in 1946, Foote earned $750 and quit his job to write full-time.
Novels Foote's first novel, Tournament (1949), was inspired by his planter grandfather, who died two years before the author's birth. For his next novel, Follow Me Down (1950), Foote drew on the proceedings of a Greenville murder trial he attended in 1941. Love in a Dry Season (1951) was his attempt to deal with the "upper classes of the Mississippi Delta" around the time of the Great Depression. Foote often expressed great affection for this novel.
In Shiloh (1952), Foote developed his use of historical narrative to tell the story of the bloodiest battle in American history to that point. The narrative is presented by 17 characters: Confederate soldiers Metcalf, Dade, and Polly and Union soldiers Fountain and Flickner, with each of the 12 named soldiers in the Indiana squad given one section of that chapter. The novel quickly sold 6,000 copies and was praised by critics. The book does showcase Foote's Southern chauvinism, as the author "favored the South throughout the novel, portraying the Confederate cause as a fight for constitutional liberty and omitting any reference to slavery."
Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative (1954) is a collection of novellas, short stories, and sketches from Foote's mythical Mississippi county.
September, September (1978) is the story of three white Southerners who kidnap the 8-year-old son of a wealthy African American, told against the backdrop of Memphis in September 1957. Foote struggled to write realistic African-American characters. Writing black characters for the novel "scared the hell out of" him, and he particularly struggled with the novel's wealthy Theo Wiggins. Foote told Walker Percy the character was one of "those bourgeois negroes, and I never really knew a single bourgeois nigger in my life."
Although he was not one of America's best-known fiction writers, Foote was admired by peers like Eudora Welty and his literary hero William Faulkner. The latter once told a University of Virginia class that Foote "shows promise, if he'll just stop trying to write Faulkner, and will write some Shelby Foote." Foote's fiction was recommended by both The New Yorker and critics from The New York Times Book Review.
History
Foote moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1952. He worked on an epic called Two Gates to the City that he had begun outlining in 1951. He was struggling with the "dark, horrible novel" when Bennett Cerf of Random House asked Foote to write a short history of the Civil War. Cerf was impressed with the factual accuracy and rich detail of Shiloh, and he wanted to capitalize on the centenary of the war. Cerf offered him a contract for a work of approximately 200,000 words.
Foote worked for several weeks on an outline and decided that Cerf's specifications were too small. He requested the project be expanded to three volumes of 5–600,000 words each. He estimated it would take nine years. It took twenty. The finished work ran to 3000 pages and was titled The Civil War: A Narrative. The individual volumes are Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963), and Red River to Appomattox (1974).
Foote had no training as a historian. He visited battlefields and read widely: standard biographies, campaign studies, and recent books by Hudson Strode, Bruce Catton, James G. Randall, Clifford Dowdey, T. Harry Williams, Kenneth M. Stampp and Allan Nevins.Shelby Foote, "Bibliographical note" in Red River to Appomattox (1974) pp 1063–1064. 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.
Foote described himself as a "novelist-historian" who employed "the historian’s standards without his paraphernalia" and "employed the novelist’s methods without his license."Mitchell, Douglas. "'The Conflict Is behind Me Now": Shelby Foote Writes the Civil War." The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 2003. To heighten the storytelling of his book, Foote eschewed footnotes. Citations would have "totally shattered what I was doing. I didn't want people glancing down at the bottom of the page every other sentence." Foote concluded most historians are "so concerned with finding out what happened that they make the enormous mistake of equating facts with truth...you can't get the truth from facts. The truth is the way you feel about it."Mackowski, C (ed.) 2020, Entertaining History : The Civil War in Literature, Film, and Song, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, p.58–61.
During the project, Foote lived off two Guggenheim Fellowships (1955–1960), Ford Foundation grants, and loans from Walker Percy.
Reception Many reviews of The Civil War: A Narrative praised its style. Southern historian C. Vann Woodward argued Foote's work was acceptable "narrative history," which "nonprofessionals have all but taken over."
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.Barr, Alwyn. “The Journal of Southern History.” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 41, no. 3, 1975, pp. 418–419. 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."John F. Marszalek, "The Civil War, A Narrative: Red River to Appomattox: Review," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine (April 1976) 59#2 pp 223-225.
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."Richard N, Current, "Review," Journal of Southern History (Aug 1993) 59#3 p. 595. Academic historians routinely lament Foote's lack of citations.James I. Robertson Jr. "The Civil War: A Narrative (review)" Civil War History, Volume 21, Number 2, June 1975, pp. 172-175
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." Foote's biographer concluded, "at its best, Foote's writing dramatised tensions related to racial and regional identity. At its worst, it fell back on the social prescriptions of Southern paternalism."
Lost Cause Many critics read Foote as sympathetic to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth. He relied extensively on the work of Hudson Strode, whose sympathy for Lost Cause claims resulted in a portrait of Jefferson Davis as a tragic hero without many of the flaws attributed to him by other historians." Annette Gordon-Reed suggested Foote's work is powered by romantic nostalgia and bears "the very strong mark of memory as opposed to history...the memories of that war which grew up with many white Southern males of his generation, are what power the narrative."