Shelby Foote

Historian and novelist Shelby Foote (1916-2005), a Greenville native, spent decades researching and writing the acclaimed three-part book series The Civil War: A Narrative. He gained wide public attention through commentary in the acclaimed 11-hour Ken Burns PBS documentary on the Civil War, which aired in 1990. He was a close associate of Walker Percy, another fiction writer from Greenville, and Delta society figured large in his fiction. A journalist and short story writer early in his career, Foote was admired by William Faulkner and other literary figures. He departed from many history scholars in his focus on storytelling and shunning of academic footnotes. Foote’s other books included Shiloh, a novel offering a vivid re-creation of the epic Civil War battle through soldiers’ monologues, and Tournament, one of a series of novels set in a fictional Mississippi Delta town.