Shelby Foote

Internet Sites:

• Shelby Foote by C. Stuart Chapman
  Mississippi Writers page
  

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Biography:

Shelby Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the product of two prominent Southern families.  His father, Shelby Dade Foote, was the grandson of a Confederate officer and the son of a plantation owner, Huger Foote.  Unfortunately, Huger Foote gambled away his fortune and land and left his son without an inheritance.  When Shelby Dade Foote married Lillian Rosenstock, he supported them by working as a clerk at Armour Meats, a job his father-in-law procured for him.  Shelby Dade Foote was soon promoted to management at Armour and it appeared he would continue to climb the company ranks, moving frequently.  In the first few years of his life, Foote and his family lived in Greenville, Vicksburg, MS, Pensacola, FL, and Mobile, AL.  However, when Foote was only five his father died from septicemia unexpectedly caused by minor surgery, and his mother moved permanently back to Greenville.

Foote grew up in the small, Southern town, attending school with his best friend, Walker Percy.  Both boys' interest in literature was stimulated by Percy's uncle, a flamboyant writer who lived in the town.  Foote showed writing talent early.  He was the editor of the high school paper, The Pica.  He had difficulty getting along with the school's principal, however, and a negative review from the principal nearly kept him out of college.  The University of North Carolina rejected his application when he first applied.  Stubbornly Foote came anyway, persuading the school to accept him when he arrived in 1935.  Foote realized that at the height of the Depression schools couldn't afford to turn any paying student away.

Foote was an indifferent college student.  He attended the classes he liked but ignored the ones he did not, spending most of his free hours reading.  His appetite was voracious, and he read Proust, Mann, Joyce, and other Modernists as well as more traditional works.  He also wrote frequently for the university's periodical, the Carolina Magazine.  He left the university in 1937 without completing his degree.  When he left school he began working on his own writing, finishing a novel that he submitted for publication in 1940.  Publishers told him his work was too experimental, but he should keep writing.

Foote had other plans, however.  He had been watching the rise of fascism abroad with interest, and when Hitler invaded Poland he decided events had reached a point of no return.  He enlisted in the Mississippi National Guard, convinced war was imminent.  In 1940 his unit was mobilized into the regular Army and sent overseas.  Foote rose to the rank of captain before being court-martialed in 1944.  The circumstances of the court-martial are murky, but it appears the charges were trumped up because of Foote's conflict with a superior officer.  He was officially charged with falsifying government documents, in this case the mileage report on a trip to see his girlfriend in Belfast.  The trip was slightly over the 50-mile limit imposed for using government vehicles, but apparently it was common practice to only cite the mileage from their camp to the city (50 miles), ignoring any small differentials caused by where the destination was located within the town.  Whatever the extenuating circumstances, Foote was discharged following the court-martial and returned to the United States.

After his discharge he worked as a reporter for a few months, recovering from the sudden, ignominious end to his military career.  Foote was unable to remain a civilian, however, and he enlisted in the Marines in 1945, serving as a stateside intelligence officer until the end of the war.  He had married his Irish girlfriend, Tess Lavery, and they lived in New York after the war while Foote took a variety of jobs to support them.  In his spare time, he pulled out the rejected manuscript of his first novel and began working on it.   His revisions succeeded, or perhaps the editorial climate had changed, and Tournament was published in 1949.   The novel recounts the financial and moral ruin of a Southern planter by gambling; a plot no doubt inspired by stories of his grandfather's loss of the family fortune.

Three other novels, one each year, followed.  The works were critically praised, and the last, Shiloh (1952) was also a popular and financial success.  The money from these works allowed Foote to return to the South, and he settled in Greenville again.  His next book, however, was not coming together as easily as the previous ones had.  He had intended it to be a panoramic picture of life in the Mississippi Delta, but the book refused to come together.  He spent two years trying to finish it, turning increasingly to women and drink to assuage his frustration.  This frustration is understandable, since, as he admits, Foote hates revision and avoids it whenever possible.  At last he gave up on the project, at least temporarily, and cut his losses. He moved to Memphis, TN, perhaps thinking a change of scene would help him start fresh.   He published the salvageable material from the work as a collection of thematically linked stories called Jordan County (1954).  Then he turned to nonfiction, agreeing to write a short history of the Civil War for Random House, his publisher.

After a year and a half of work, Foote returned to Random House and asked for a re-negotiation.  He  found the subject far too large and compelling to confine within the narrow framework previously envisioned.  His publisher agreed to the changes, and Foote delivered the first volume of his history in 1958 and the second in 1963.  The work was quickly recognized as a landmark in historical writing.  Employing novelistic techniques while still adhering to historical fact, Foote breathed life into the well-known events.  Some historians faulted his use of lists of sources at the end of each chapter rather than individual footnotes, but readers and literary critics agreed that the series was a masterpiece.  The disturbances attendant on the fight for Civil Rights delayed the third volume by a few years, as Foote's move to rural Alabama had to be abandoned when the local KKK began to harass his family.  Foote was upset by the intolerance demonstrated by Southern segregationists.  He finished the last volume over ten years later, in 1974.

The history sold well, if not spectacularly, until the airing of Ken Burns' popular documentary The Civil War in 1990.  Burns used Foote as a commentator for the film, as well as basing much of his version of events on Foote's history.  Viewers were struck by Foote's distinctive voice and accent, as well as his patrician, Robert E. Lee-like appearance.  Overnight, Foote became a reluctant celebrity.  Sales of his history soared.  Despite his sudden fame, Foote remains relatively unaffected by celebrity.  He continues to live in Memphis and writes daily, although he has published little since September September (1978).

 References:

• Kibler, James E., Jr.  "Shelby Foote."  Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 2, Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman, eds.  Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978.
• Wilson, Clyde N.  "Shelby Foote."  Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 17, Clyde N. Wilson, ed.  Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1983.

--Jennifer Duke-Sylvester

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Primary Bibliography:  

• Tournament. New York: Dial, 1949
• Follow Me Down. New York: Dial, 1950
• Love in a Dry Season. New York: Dial, 1951
• Shiloh. New York: Dial, 1952
• Jordan County. New York: Dial, 1954
• The Night Before Chancellorsville and Other Civil War Stories, edited by Shelby Foote. New York: New American Library, 1957
• The Civil War: A Narrative: Fort Sumter to Perryville. New York: Random House, 1958
• The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian. New York: Random House, 1963
• Three Novels. New York: Dial, 1964
• The Civil War: A Narrative: Red River to Appomattox. New York: Random House, 1974
• September September. New York: Random House, 1978
• Conversations with Shelby Foote, edited by William C. Carter. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989
• The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy, edited by Jay Tolson. New York: Center for Documentary Studies in association with Norton, 1997
• Chekhov, Anton. Early Short Stories, 1883-1888, edited by Shelby Foote. New York: Modern Library, 1999
• Chekhov, Anton. Later Short Stories, 1888-1903, edited by Shelby Foote. New York: Modern Library, 1999
• Chekhov, Anton. Longer Stories from the Last Decade, edited by Shelby Foote. New York: Modern Library, 2000

Manuscripts:

• Shelby Foote Papers, 1935-1999, Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Secondary Bibliography:  

• White, Helen, and Redding S. Sugg, Jr. Shelby Foote. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
• Phillips, Robert L., Jr. Shelby Foote: Novelist and Historian. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.