Shelby Foote

American · 1916 to 2005

Born on November 17, 1916, in Greenville, Mississippi, the only child of Shelby Dade Foote Sr., an executive with Armour and Company, and Lillian Rosenstock, the daughter of a Jewish immigrant from Vienna, Shelby Foote Jr. lost his father at five and was raised by his mother in the Mississippi Delta. At fifteen he began a lifelong friendship with the Percy brothers next door, the future novelist Walker Percy among them. At Greenville High he edited the school paper and lampooned the principal, who took revenge by writing the University of North Carolina urging that Foote not be admitted; Foote got in only by passing entrance examinations. He served in the Mississippi National Guard and the Marines during the Second World War, was court-martialled for falsifying a vehicle log to visit his girlfriend in Belfast, and came back to Greenville to work for a radio station and write fiction. His first published story appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1946. Five novels followed, of which Shiloh (1952), told by seventeen voices on both sides of the bloodiest day in American history to that point, remains the most read. In 1954 Bennett Cerf of Random House asked him to write a short history of the Civil War for its centenary; Foote said it would take nine years and three volumes. It took twenty, and ran to nearly three thousand pages, all of it composed by hand with a dip pen. The Civil War: A Narrative (1958, 1963, 1974) became the work for which he is remembered. Ken Burns's 1990 PBS series made him a household voice. He died on June 27, 2005, in Memphis, at the age of eighty-eight.