Shelby Foote is dead.
He was an army captain court-martialed and discharged during WWII, officially for falsifying a government document and unofficially for pissing off the wrong officer. He thought the war was too important an event not to be involved in it, and (as so many Southern men did and do) he wanted to be in the fight. So he reenlisted with the marines -- non-com, not officer -- to get back into it. He never saw battle however; the bomb was dropped while he was still being shipped across the Pacific.
He was at various times a journalist for the AP, a novelist, and a writer of narrative history. His three volume history of the American Civil War was meant to be one volume, was written in a steady slog of 400-600 words a day by hand with a quill pen (because he wanted the act of writing to take long enough to give him time to be sure he was using the precise word he intended), and remains one of the 'eminently readable' histories that actually matches its description.
He had a slow drawl, and a contemplative mind, and smoked pipe tobacco that actually smelled good. He talked of Civil War officers and their families as if he had grown up in the same neighborhood with them, as if the stories of who feuded with whom, and which general's daughters married another general's son or nephew or cousin's son, and which of them went on to be officers themselves, were details from his own life, not from journals and ledgers and letters. When his house burnt a few years ago, we lost an irreplacable chunk of primary sources.
I had the joy of taking a Civil War class in college which consisted of reading his books and showing up once a week to listen to the man talk about the assigned reading and, more interestingly, from the assigned reading. He would light up his pipe and just... talk. Taking that class was an education, a privilege, and a pleasure. (I've never understood how my college got him to do it, or why so few people showed up. We had a class of a dozen, including some faculty who wouldn't have dreamed of missing it.)
He was, in short, a gentleman and a scholar. He did not die young, but nonetheless, I'm sorry we've lost him.
He was at various times a journalist for the AP, a novelist, and a writer of narrative history. His three volume history of the American Civil War was meant to be one volume, was written in a steady slog of 400-600 words a day by hand with a quill pen (because he wanted the act of writing to take long enough to give him time to be sure he was using the precise word he intended), and remains one of the 'eminently readable' histories that actually matches its description.
He had a slow drawl, and a contemplative mind, and smoked pipe tobacco that actually smelled good. He talked of Civil War officers and their families as if he had grown up in the same neighborhood with them, as if the stories of who feuded with whom, and which general's daughters married another general's son or nephew or cousin's son, and which of them went on to be officers themselves, were details from his own life, not from journals and ledgers and letters. When his house burnt a few years ago, we lost an irreplacable chunk of primary sources.
I had the joy of taking a Civil War class in college which consisted of reading his books and showing up once a week to listen to the man talk about the assigned reading and, more interestingly, from the assigned reading. He would light up his pipe and just... talk. Taking that class was an education, a privilege, and a pleasure. (I've never understood how my college got him to do it, or why so few people showed up. We had a class of a dozen, including some faculty who wouldn't have dreamed of missing it.)
He was, in short, a gentleman and a scholar. He did not die young, but nonetheless, I'm sorry we've lost him.