Success as a Writer
Foote’s first period of professional success coincided with his brief and tumultuous marriage to Memphis socialite Peggy Stinson and the birth of their daughter, Margaret Dade Foote, in 1949. After their 1953 divorce, Foote followed Peggy back to her native Memphis, Tennessee, in order to be closer to his daughter. From the Bluff City in 1954, Foote published Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative, a compilation of short stories, and began outlining what he vainly hoped would become his magnum opus, “Two Gates to the City.” But Foote put his fiction career on hold when later that same year, Random House approached the author of Shiloh to write a 200,000-word history of the Civil War in time for the conflict’s centennial. Foote gladly accepted – and greatly expanded – the proposal. There in his downtown Memphis apartment, Foote commenced work on his famed twenty-year, one-and-half million-word project – The Civil War: A Narrative.
The Memphis apartment would not remain a bachelor’s pad for long. In 1956, Foote married Gwyn Rainer Shea, forming a union that lasted nearly fifty years and produced one son, Huger Lee Foote II, in 1963. While he enjoyed the beginning of a stable home life, Foote published the first volume of the Narrative, Fort Sumter to Perrysville, in 1958, using the stipends from three consecutive Guggenheim fellowships to travel to different battlegrounds for his research. Without delay – and, notably, always without the aid of a research assistant – Foote penned the second volume, Fredericksburg to Meridian, which hit the shelves in 1963. In between the publication of the second and third volumes, Foote took time off from the trilogy and served as the writer-in-residence for University of Virginia in 1963-64 and Memphis State University in 1966-67, adapted Jordan County for the stage as a Ford Foundation fellow in Washington D.C., and taught for part of 1968 at Hollins College. Clearly, Foote enjoyed attention among academic circles for his work. Even more professional recognition would follow after the 1974 publication of the Narrative’s final and longest volume, Red River to Appomattox.
Vital to understanding his trilogy and its critical responses, Foote subtitled the trilogy A Narrative. From the first volume’s cover, then, Foote the fiction author – who, after all, never earned a college degree and never trained as a professional historian – indicated his particular approach to writing history. Explaining this approach in the bibliographical note at the end of the Narrative’s first volume, Foote wrote that by “accepting the historian’s standards without his paraphernalia, I have employed the novelist’s methods without his license.”[3] In practice, this meant that Foote attempted to write about the Civil War as the officers and soldiers who lived through it had experienced it, and not through the critical lens of the historian. Along this line, Foote boldly rejected footnotes in his Narrative, claiming that they would “detract from the book’s narrative quality;” this decision agitated many academic historians.[4] Moreover, Foote shunned original research and only referenced published biographies of military leaders and the 128-volume compilation of military reports and correspondence from the war, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Throughout his three volumes, then, Foote offered a chiefly military history of the war, describing the battle tactics and landscapes in vivid detail, delving into the characters and quirks of the major military leaders, and largely neglecting to analyze the causes and consequences of the nation’s bloodiest conflict.
In practice, this meant that Foote attempted to write about the Civil War as the officers and soldiers who lived through it had experienced it, and not through the critical lens of the historian.
Unsurprisingly, this lack of analysis attracted the criticism of professional historians. C. Vann Woodward, for instance, labeled the trilogy a “purely military history” and though he also praised Foote’s style, literary critic Louis Rubin concluded that Foote had written “a disenthralled narrative of just how the war as fought out.”[5] But these criticisms cannot be evaluated in a vacuum. After all, as Foote scribbled away, twenty years had passed and two revolutions unfolded. The first revolution – the advent of social history – stirred the academic community from the late 1950s through the 1970s, prompting historians to study the lives and contributions of the working class, African Americans, women, and other previously voiceless sectors of society. This professional trend did not influence the self-proclaimed “novelist-historian,” who remained intent on retelling the story of military elites while largely ignoring the war’s social and political contexts. Coinciding with this popularization of social history in academic circles, the civil rights movement rocked the entire nation at mid-century. Again, this revolution hardly influenced Foote’s Narrative. Although he generally sympathized with the plight of African Americans and opposed segregation as early as the 1930s, Foote rarely acted on these beliefs. Moreover, he wrote his trilogy from an identifiable white southern perspective. As in Shiloh, this perspective manifested throughout the Narrative in near silence over slavery and black contributions to the war effort. Instead, Foote emphasized the close relationships between the opposing commanders and generally presented the Civil War as a white man’s war – a brother’s war – fought between two noble adversaries. Criticism of this interpretation would later resurface with greater force in response to Foote’s appearances in the Burns documentary.
To his credit, Foote paid greater attention to the Western theater – the fighting outside of the well-known Virginia battles – than had other Civil War writers, including contemporary midwestern historians Bruce Catton and Alan Nevins. Literary critics also appreciated Foote’s narrative style. Among other warm reviews, Peter Prescott claimed in Newsweek that to read Foote’s “chronicle is an awesome and moving experience. History and literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here; one finishes this volume convinced that no one need undertake this particular enterprise again.”[6] The public largely agreed and the Narrative sold well, earning Foote nearly $100,000 in royalties within the first several months of the trilogy’s completion.
With the Narrative now behind him, Foote resumed his fiction career, releasing September, September in 1977. Set in 1957 Memphis, Foote’s fifth and final novel revolved around the kidnapping of a wealthy black family’s son by white criminals. Exploring the racial and political climate of the 1950s south, September, September marked Foote’s first attempt to capture black life and culture. Although it received little critical praise and sold slowly, Turner Broadcasting Service adapted the novel into the 1990 movie Memphis, starring Cybill Shepherd. Otherwise, however, the late 1970s and the 1980s beheld little creative output for Foote. Once again, Foote had turned to “Two Gates to the City”, the elusive novel now thirty years unfinished. And once again, his unwritten masterpiece defeated Foote, who eventually abandoned the project. Not only did his writing stagnate during the 1980s, but Foote also suffered from health problems. In 1983, the 67-year-old underwent an angioplasty and in 1985 into 1986, he was treated for prostate cancer.
[3] Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume One (New York: Random House Inc., 1958), 815.
[4] Ibid.
[5] C. Vann Woodward, “The Great American Butchery,” The New York Review of Books, 6 March 1975: 12; Louis Rubin, “Old-Style History,” The New Republic, 30 November 1974: 44.
[6] Peter S. Prescott, “Where the Action Was,” Newsweek, 2 December 1974: 103.
To his credit, Foote paid greater attention to the Western theater – the fighting outside of the well-known Virginia battles – than had other Civil War writers, including contemporary midwestern historians Bruce Catton and Alan Nevins. Literary critics also appreciated Foote’s narrative style. Among other warm reviews, Peter Prescott claimed in Newsweek that to read Foote’s “chronicle is an awesome and moving experience. History and literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here; one finishes this volume convinced that no one need undertake this particular enterprise again.”[6] The public largely agreed and the Narrative sold well, earning Foote nearly $100,000 in royalties within the first several months of the trilogy’s completion.
With the Narrative now behind him, Foote resumed his fiction career, releasing September, September in 1977. Set in 1957 Memphis, Foote’s fifth and final novel revolved around the kidnapping of a wealthy black family’s son by white criminals. Exploring the racial and political climate of the 1950s south, September, September marked Foote’s first attempt to capture black life and culture. Although it received little critical praise and sold slowly, Turner Broadcasting Service adapted the novel into the 1990 movie Memphis, starring Cybill Shepherd. Otherwise, however, the late 1970s and the 1980s beheld little creative output for Foote. Once again, Foote had turned to “Two Gates to the City”, the elusive novel now thirty years unfinished. And once again, his unwritten masterpiece defeated Foote, who eventually abandoned the project. Not only did his writing stagnate during the 1980s, but Foote also suffered from health problems. In 1983, the 67-year-old underwent an angioplasty and in 1985 into 1986, he was treated for prostate cancer.
[3] Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume One (New York: Random House Inc., 1958), 815.
[4] Ibid.
[5] C. Vann Woodward, “The Great American Butchery,” The New York Review of Books, 6 March 1975: 12; Louis Rubin, “Old-Style History,” The New Republic, 30 November 1974: 44.
[6] Peter S. Prescott, “Where the Action Was,” Newsweek, 2 December 1974: 103.