Writer's Notebook: Bard of the American Iliad

The work was initially criticized for its failings as an academic achievement, mainly because Foote had charted his own course in telling the story of the war and its characters. In a break from tradition, he chose to write history from a literary perspective and with a grim flair that highlighted the agony of battle and its human toll. Such an approach had never been done before on such a scale and to such a subject.

Although criticized by some, it was hailed by author Walker Percy as “an unparalleled achievement, our American Iliad”, with Shelby Foote as its Homer. The Civil War: A Narrative remains the crowning achievement of his career and a great American work of literature, told with a vast landscape of characters and in finely detailed, wrenching human drama. He wrote history as a novelist would write it, not with dry facts, but in a fluid narrative that was sympathetic, humorous, full of metaphors and colloquialisms for literary impact, and stunningly artistic. “A good novelist has as much devotion to the truth as a good historian,” he explained in a 1961 interview.

Shelby Foote was born in the delta town of Greenville, Mississippi on November 17, 1916, the product of deep southern roots. Among his ancestors was Isaac Shelby, a Revolutionary War hero and frontiersman who went on to become the first governor of Kentucky. Foote’s great grandfather was a Confederate cavalry captain who fought at the Battle of Shiloh (where, as Foote told the story “his sword got bent and his horse’s tail got shot off.”) He attended Greenville High School, where fellow writer and life-long friend Walker Percy was a classmate, and where Foote began writing poetry and short stories. He attended North Carolina University for a brief period before dropping out.

He often told the story of his first meeting with fellow Mississipian William Faulkner in 1938. Percy had invited Foote to ride up with him to Oxford one day to see the writer. The two drove up and arrived at Rowan Oak completely unnanounced on the writer's doorstep. But Percy got cold feet and it was Foote who knocked on the door and introduced himself to Faulkner. Percy later admitted he was intimidated by Faulkner's stature as an author and sat in the car the whole time. Meanwhile, Foote and Faulkner sat on his porch for over two hours talking and having a good time.

Foote credits that singular meeting with his passion to become a writer. faulkner and Foote remained friends until Faulkner’s death in 1962.

In 1940, a restless Shelby Foote joined the United States Army and served as a Captain of field artillery during World War 2. He found odd jobs after the war, and continued to write. His break came in 1946 when his first short story was published in The Saturday Evening Post. Following this, his first novel Tournament was published, the first of a string of five novels he would ultimately produce.

Like William Faulkner, Shelby Foote embodied the ambiguous feelings many southerners had about the South. His fiction typified the Southern Gothic style of literature then in vogue by writer like William Faulkner. He criticized racial segregation and discrimination, and was once threatened by the Ku Klux Klan for his views. When the American Legion burned his 1950 novel Follow Me Down because it was considered “a dirty book” along with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he wryly commented, “I consider it an honor to be burned along with D.H. Lawrence.”

Articles in this Notebook: Magazine: Go Down Faulkner The Agony and The Sweat Eudora Welty A Streetcar Named Tennessee Bard of the American Iliad The Existential Walker Percy Richard Wright (1908-1960) Margaret Walker Alexander Ellen Gilchrist Willie Morris Clifton Taulbert Essays: Oxford Wedding Recommended Reading: Soldier's Heart (Samet) Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Bierce)	BARD OF THE AMERICAN ILIAD by Stephen Enzweiler
	He was best known as the kindly, bearded commentator of the Ken Burns ten-part PBS series The Civil War, with his soft, mellifluous Mississippi drawl and his ability to bring the war vividly to life on the screen. But when Shelby Foote died in Memphis on June 27, 2005 at age 88, America lost more than a television personality; it lost what many critics have come to call the faithful bard of the great American story. “If you and I are to understand anything at all about this country, you have to understand something about the Civil War,” Foote would say. “The Revolution did what it did, it set us free. But the Civil War decided what kind of a country this was going to be, good and bad.” His life’s mission, as he saw it, was to write down the truth about the conflict that tore our nation apart. It began as a singular assignment for Random House in 1953: to write a 200,000 word narrative of the Civil War conflict. But he realized early that it was an impossible task. He spent the next two decades heavily researching and writing in an effort that ultimately culminated in his massive, critically acclaimed three-volume chronicle The Civil War: A Narrative, published in 1958, 1963, and 1974.
	“If you and I are to understand anything at all about this country, you have to understand something about the Civil War,” Foote often said. “The Revolution did what it did, it set us free. But the Civil War decided what kind of a country this was going to be, good and bad.”	Shelby Foote (1916-2005)
	The work was initially criticized for its failings as an academic achievement, mainly because Foote had charted his own course in telling the story of the war and its characters. In a break from tradition, he chose to write history from a literary perspective and with a grim flair that highlighted the agony of battle and its human toll. Such an approach had never been done before on such a scale and to such a subject. Although criticized by some, it was hailed by author Walker Percy as “an unparalleled achievement, our American Iliad”, with Shelby Foote as its Homer. The Civil War: A Narrative remains the crowning achievement of his career and a great American work of literature, told with a vast landscape of characters and in finely detailed, wrenching human drama. He wrote history as a novelist would write it, not with dry facts, but in a fluid narrative that was sympathetic, humorous, full of metaphors and colloquialisms for literary impact, and stunningly artistic. “A good novelist has as much devotion to the truth as a good historian,” he explained in a 1961 interview. Shelby Foote was born in the delta town of Greenville, Mississippi on November 17, 1916, the product of deep southern roots. Among his ancestors was Isaac Shelby, a Revolutionary War hero and frontiersman who went on to become the first governor of Kentucky. Foote’s great grandfather was a Confederate cavalry captain who fought at the Battle of Shiloh (where, as Foote told the story “his sword got bent and his horse’s tail got shot off.”) He attended Greenville High School, where fellow writer and life-long friend Walker Percy was a classmate, and where Foote began writing poetry and short stories. He attended North Carolina University for a brief period before dropping out. He often told the story of his first meeting with fellow Mississipian William Faulkner in 1938. Percy had invited Foote to ride up with him to Oxford one day to see the writer. The two drove up and arrived at Rowan Oak completely unnanounced on the writer's doorstep. But Percy got cold feet and it was Foote who knocked on the door and introduced himself to Faulkner. Percy later admitted he was intimidated by Faulkner's stature as an author and sat in the car the whole time. Meanwhile, Foote and Faulkner sat on his porch for over two hours talking and having a good time. Foote credits that singular meeting with his passion to become a writer. faulkner and Foote remained friends until Faulkner’s death in 1962. In 1940, a restless Shelby Foote joined the United States Army and served as a Captain of field artillery during World War 2. He found odd jobs after the war, and continued to write. His break came in 1946 when his first short story was published in The Saturday Evening Post. Following this, his first novel Tournament was published, the first of a string of five novels he would ultimately produce. Like William Faulkner, Shelby Foote embodied the ambiguous feelings many southerners had about the South. His fiction typified the Southern Gothic style of literature then in vogue by writer like William Faulkner. He criticized racial segregation and discrimination, and was once threatened by the Ku Klux Klan for his views. When the American Legion burned his 1950 novel Follow Me Down because it was considered “a dirty book” along with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he wryly commented, “I consider it an honor to be burned along with D.H. Lawrence.”
	He lived a simple life in the same Tudor style home on East Parkway in Memphis for nearly four decades. He rose daily and worked from 8 am until 5 pm, writing 500 to 1,000 words a day in longhand, using an old-fashioned dip pen and ink. Asked once if he had any hobbies, he replied, “Absolutely not! But I do drink from time to time.”	Foote in his Memphis study c. 1990
	In 1990, his collaboration with filmmaker Ken Burns in the making of the ten-part miniseries The Civil War brought him instant national acclaim. America became fascinated by the stories and anecdotes told by the quiet, bearded man with the honey-soft, melodic Mississippi drawl some described as “molasses over hominy”. He drew most of his material from his own three-volume history, and when he spoke of the war and its characters, it was if he had been there himself. “He made the war real for us,” said Ken Burns. But Foote disliked the fame and publicity the film brought. For years afterward, he seldom granted interviews or signed autographs, and he went out of his way to avoid appearing on camera, which he called “that little box.” Gregarious and energetic in his earlier days, by the mid-1990’s, he preferred to be left alone, to read and to write as he always had in the small, simple office he worked in behind his house. He lived a simple life in the same Tudor style home on East Parkway in Memphis for nearly four decades. He was married to the former Gwyn Ranier for 49 years and had two children. He rose daily and worked from 8 am until 5 pm, writing 500 to 1,000 words a day in longhand, using an old-fashioned dip pen and ink. Asked once if he had any hobbies, he replied, “Absolutely not! But I do drink from time to time.” While Foote rarely won prizes for his writing, he did win three Guggenheim Fellowships, A Ford Foundation Grant (1963), the first Tennessee Governor’s Award for the Humanities (1991), and the Frankel Prize from Columbia University (1992). He was writer in residence at the University of Virginia in 1963 and at the University of Memphis in 1968. When he died, he was buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis in the same plot once occupied by Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Foote purchased the grave plot when it became available after Forrest's body was moved to a different location to accomodate a new monument to him. It is appropriate, considering his life and work, that Shelby Foote rests today among Nathan Bedford Forrest's family members still interred at Elmwood. Since his death, Shelby Foote’s books have risen in popularity. His writings on the Gettysburg campaign were recently republished under the title “The Stars In Their Courses.” But the crowning achievement of his writing career remains his critically and popularly acclaimed The Civil War: A Narrative. “A big sustaining thing was I believed firmly that I was doing important work,” He told the Academy of Achievement in a 1999 interview. “I thought it was going good, so I felt good. There's nothing that makes a writer truly as happy as that."
	Stephen Enzweiler is a journalist, author, and writer for Y'all Magazine. Contact: steve@yall.com.