He was best known as the kindly, bearded commentator of Ken Burns’ miniseries series The Civil War, with his soft, mellifluous Mississippi drawl and his ability to bring the war to life on the screen. His life’s mission, as he saw it, was to write down the truth about the conflict that tore the nation apart for four long and bloody years. “If you and I are to understand anything at all about this country,” he maintained, “you have to understand something about the Civil War. The Revolution did what it did. But the Civil War decided what kind of a country this was going to be—good and bad.”

Shelby Foote was born in the Mississippi Delta city of Greenville in 1916, the product of deep Southern roots. He attended Greenville High School with author Walker Percy, and it was there he began writing poetry and short stories. He was an Army captain in World War II, and afterward moved to Memphis, worked odd jobs and continued to write.

His big break came in 1953, when he was asked to write a “short” narrative of the Civil War. He spent nearly 20 years researching and writing what became the defining work of his life: the massive three-volume chronicle The Civil War: A Narrative. His lifelong dedication to the subject led him to collaborate with filmmaker Burns in the making of the The Civil War. The series brought him national acclaim, as did his appearance in Rebel Forrest, a documentary about Foote’s Southern hero, Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. But Foote disliked the publicity which the TV camera brought, and he shunned the spotlight, preferring to be left alone to write as he always had in the small, simple office he maintained behind his home on East Parkway in Memphis, Tenn., until his death at age 88 in 2005.

by Stephen Enzweiler

Tennessee Williams	Ellen Gilchrist	John Grisham	Margaret Walker Alexander
Clifton Taulbert	Eudora Welty	Richard Wright	Shelby Foote
Jimmy Buffett	Greg Iles	William Faulkner	Jill Conner Browne
	Walker Percy	Willie Morris