Author Shelby Foote, 88
Posted: Friday, July 1st, 2005 10:19 pm
Shelby Foote, the author who died in Memphis June 27 at the age of 88, never imagined fame would come the way it did. As a youth in Mississippi, he dreamed of being a great novelist, like William Faulkner, whom he and his boyhood pal Walker Percy once visited. Foote wrote novels but none as acclaimed as those of either Faulkner or Percy. It was his gigantic piece of nonfiction — a three-volume, 2,934-page, 1.5 million-word history, The Civil War: A Narrative — that convinced critics of Foote’s remarkable skills. But despite the 20 years of research and writing he put into his monumental work, most Americans would never have heard of Shelby Foote. That changed over the course of one week in 1990 — the week the writer became a talker.
In five consecutive nights in the autumn of that year, Foote made 89 appearances on Ken Burns’s PBS series The Civil War. Fourteen million viewers saw him in his Memphis study talking about the war as if it had happened the day before. His detailed knowledge, Delta drawl, and courtly manner helped make the series a smash hit and turned him into a prime-time star, a status ironically that he did not totally enjoy. He lamented “this hoorah” and “this ruckjack,” the commotion that brought forth a “horrendous” flow of letters and phone calls, not to mention nosy questions from journalists. When one reporter asked if he had any hobbies, he replied: “Absolutely not.” Then he added, “I drink from time to time.” … Read full obituary
