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Civil War Historian Shelby Foote passed away.

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UConn James All Pro

UConn James

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Too bad. He was a heck of a writer.

 

"I'm privately convinced that most of the really bad writing the world's ever seen has been done under the influence of what's called inspiration. Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time." -- Shelby Foote

UConn James All Pro

UConn James

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Notes from The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

 

It's the birthday of American novelist and historian Shelby Foote, born in Greenville, Mississippi (1916). He was a successful novelist when, in 1952, he accepted the suggestion of his publisher to write a short history of the Civil War to complement his novel Shiloh (1952). Foote is best known for his trilogy, The Civil War: A Narrative.

 

Foote grew up on the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, once a great swamp filled with alligators and water moccasin snakes. Foote's father was a manager at Armour & Co. and died of septicemia from an operation on his nose when Foote was five. Foote's mother never remarried. She spent her time getting him out of trouble. He was editor of the high school paper and liked to give the principal a hard time. When Foote applied to attend college at Chapel Hill, the principal wrote a letter saying not to let Foote into their school under any circumstances. Foote got in his car and drove to North Carolina to register anyway and told them he didn't think they meant it so they let him in. He was a literary prodigy there along with his classmate Walker Percy, who was his best friend for sixty years.

 

Foote's interest in writing began with his interest in reading. When he was eleven he won as a prize a copy of David Copperfield. Up until then, he'd read The Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift and Tarzan. He said, "This was a whole other world, and it was a world of art. I couldn't have defined it as that, but, one thing, I knew David Copperfield better than anybody I knew in the real world, including myself. I said, 'My God,' to myself, 'this is a whole world.'"

 

As a teenager, Foote sold poems to magazines for 50 cents apiece. He read and loved the work of Marcel Proust, William Faulkner and Walker Percy's uncle, Will Percy.

 

When Foote was 19 years old and he and Walker Percy were planning to drive from Foote's hometown, Greenville, Mississippi, through William Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. Foote suggested they stop in Oxford and try to meet him. Percy said he wasn't going to just knock on his door and Foote said he would. Percy waited in the car while Foote went up the cedar-tree lined walkway to Faulkner's house. He was greeted in the yard by three hounds, two fox terriers and a Dalmatian. Soon, a small man, barefoot, naked save for a pair of shorts, and seemingly drunk, appeared and asked Foote what he wanted. "Could you tell me where to find a copy of Marble Faun, Mr. Faulkner?" Foote asked. Faulkner was gruff and told him to contact his agent. Faulkner later befriended Foote, who walked Faulkner around the Civil War battlefields of Shiloh.

 

Foote once told Faulkner on one of their outings, "You know, I have every right to be a better writer than you. Your literary idols were Joseph Conrad and Sherwood Anderson. Mine are Marcel Proust and you. My writers are better than yours."

 

Foote started a novel in his late 20s, but World War II interrupted and he served in the European theater under General George Patton as a captain of field artillery. He carried with him, in his baggage, G.F.R. Henderson's Stonewall Jackson, and had Douglas South Freeman's R.E. Lee with him as often as he could lug it around. He spent his spare time drawing maps and figuring out what happened during the Civil War.

 

He said, "I think history has a plot. You don't make it up; you discover it."

 

After the service, Foote returned to fiction and sold his first short story to the Saturday Evening Post in 1946. He published several highly regarded novels—including Tournament (1949), Follow Me Down (1950) and Love in a Dry Season (1951)—before he turned to the first Civil War volume in 1952.

 

What Foote thought might be a four-year project turned into a three-volume effort that took two decades, topping 1.6 million words and a total of 2,093 pages when published. He compared the project to swallowing a cannonball. He wrote all three volumes in Memphis. Scores of television viewers were introduced to Foote during Ken Burns' 1991 PBS series "The Civil War."

 

He said, "The kind of country we are emerged from the Civil War, not from the Revolution. The Revolution provided us with a constitution; it broke us loose from England; it made us free. But the Civil War really defined us."

 

Foote writes six to eight hours a day seven days a week in his bedroom. He writes five or six hundred words a day (about 100,00 words a year) with a dip pen, which you have to dip in ink after every three or four words. After he finishes writing, he sets it aside to dry, then copies it off on a typewriter and puts it on the stack without editing, because Foote doesn't see a need to edit his work. He likes to be left alone when he writes. He often quotes words John Keats wrote in a letter: "A fact is not a truth until you love it."

 

Foote said, "I'm privately convinced that most of the really bad writing the world's ever seen has been done under the influence of what's called inspiration. Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time."

 

And he said, "I have noticed that when a man dies, no matter at what age or by what cause, his life then has a beginning and a middle and an end, and sometimes his death explains his youth."

 

And, "A writer's like anybody else except when he's writing."

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