Shelby Foote
Shelby Foote
Shelby Dade Foote, Jr.was an American historian and novelist who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the war. With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. Foote was little known to the general public until his appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990, where he...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth17 November 1916
CityGreenville, MS
CountryUnited States of America
During that year while we were waiting to be inducted into federal service, I wrote the first draft of my first novel, Tournament.
If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
Before the war it was always the United States *are*, after the war it was the United States is... it made us an is.
The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
Longevity conquers scandal every time.
But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and quality you can imagine, and that was a good experience.
Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.
Generally the first week in September brings the hottest weather of the year, and this was no exception. Overhead the fans turned slow, their paddle blades stirring the air up close to the ceiling but nowheres else...
A rich man's war and a poor man's fight...
Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.
I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.
A fact is not a truth until you love it.
Getting close to books, and spending time by myself, I was obliged to think about things I would never have thought about if I was busy romping around with a brother and sister.
I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.