The Civil War/ American Homer: A Narrative (Modern Library)

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Over the years, he liked to tell people he was working on a sprawling novel that he called "Two Gates to the City." The book was nonexistent, but it served as a good red herring. He later said, "People ought not write when they are old." The Civil War: A Narrative," released between 1958 and 1974, was written with a literate flair, a mournful lyricism that underscored the human agony of battle, defeat and victory. He received darts for the books' perceived failings as an academic undertaking; he didn't bother with footnotes and touched only vaguely on larger themes of the war's origin and ramifications. There are many things wrong with Ken Burns series and the author here vaguely touches on a few of them. That notwithstanding, I believe the author is unduly harsh on Shelby Foote. I’m not a fan of his okie-doke style of story telling and I’m no southern apologist, but I do recognize that there were two sides in the Civil War and neither side were angels. The Civil War: A Narrative, Pea Ridge to the Seven Days: War Means Fighting, Fighting Means Killing. New York: Random House. 2005. ISBN 0-307-29024-7.

Shelby Foote | Civil War, Confederate Army, Novelist | Britannica

Foote contributed a lengthy introduction to the 1993 Modern Library edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (which was published along with "The Veteran", a short story that features the hero of the larger work at the end of his life). In this introduction, Foote recounts the biography of Crane in the same narrative style as Foote's Civil War work.Susanna Henighan Potter, Moon Tennessee, 44 (Moon Handbooks, Avalon Travel Publishing, 2009) ISBN 1-59880-114-7 Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". Achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement. To some it may seem an affront to declare that Foote’s true genius was one of organization. Admiring so greatly that quality in the writing of Proust, Gibbon, and others, however, Foote would not be among those offended. The theaters of the war and the political intrigues of the men orchestrating from Washington and Richmond blend seamlessly in A Narrative, and are presented in a fashion that maximizes dramatic affect without ever compromising accuracy. Well aware of the outcome, I nonetheless found myself fearing for Lincoln’s reelection when the circumstances surrounding the 1864 campaign were placed in the context of the carnage of the Wilderness campaign and its conclusion in stalemate outside Petersburg. We wonder how a nation so weary of bloodshed and sacrifice can possibly reelect this man and endorse his vow to prosecute the war to victory, whatever the costs. It is then, however, that Foote tells us of Sherman’s great triumph in Georgia, Farragut’s vanquishing of Mobile, and Sheridan’s devastation of the Shenandoah, together revealing to the North a path to victory and winning the election for Lincoln.

The Civil War by Shelby Foote - AbeBooks The Civil War by Shelby Foote - AbeBooks

Most importantly, Mr. Foote should have gotten a few more hours of tutoring on basic military art. A stronger reader than I might take on the assignment of counting what seemed like a reuse of "Cannae" hundreds of times during the trilogy. As the cliché would have it. We are doomed to suffer (and suffer again) the nauseating ripples and echoes of the legacy of American history, if we fail to process all of its effects, heal its ghastly wounds and commit once and for all to a fundamentally better way moving forward. Over many years I have read about many Civil War battles, and the problems that Lincoln faced, but this is the first time I have learned in any detail about what the South thought was going on. Without claiming sympathy with the motives of the Lost Cause, Shelby Foote presented a number of speeches and other denunciations of Yankee tyranny, barbarism, cruelty, and alleged racial inferiority from Jefferson Davis and various political and military figures of the Confederacy, and their claim to be the true heirs of the Revolution. They also maintained that the Confederate Constitution represented the Original Intent of the Founders, particularly slave owners like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in spite of the fact that both freed their slaves in their wills.

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I doubt anyone who reads this will ever again think of the principal actors -- Lincoln, Davis, Stanton, Grant, Lee, McClellan, "Stonewall," and many others -- without seeing them in the light cast by Foote. He measures all and spares none. Just one example: you'd think that Lee would tower above the others in a true Southerner's treatment. Not so. Foote details many faults in Lee's personality, abilities, and actions.

The Civil War/ American Homer: A Narrative (Modern Library)

Eric Foner, “Ken Burns and the Romance of Reunion,” in Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond, ed. Robert Brent Toplin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 112. Foote supported himself during the twenty years he worked on the narrative with three Guggenheim Fellowships (1955–1960), Ford Foundation grants, and loans from Walker Percy. [3] [13] Scholarly reception and Lost Cause controversies [ edit ]

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In 1993, Richard N. Current argued that Foote too often depended on a single, unsupported source for lifelike details, but "probably is as accurate as most historians... Foote's monumental narrative most likely will continue to be read and remembered as a classic of its kind." [70] This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( November 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) As a millennial Yankee, the mid-century Memphis where Shelby Foote wrote his trilogy seems about as distant and foreign to me as the Civil War likely seemed to him. The books themselves are animated by an ethos as concerns the study and presentation of history equally alien to our time, one that many contemporary historians would have us believe quaint. That history need not be an exercise in applied morality, that the past provides more than raw material for us, in our higher wisdom, to “problematize,” that history can be written absent a thesis or agenda, are all ideas fallen out of favor. But who could care? It was worth the effort. It is the civil war given the full Gibbon, so to speak, (with a little bit of Milton) and the labor of reading it was both immediately gratifying for the strength of the prose as well as being a heavy thing to ponder as a painstakingly researched document of the war itself. Foote considered himself a novelist first, but I always felt he found it imperative to be accurate and accountable to the facts, be it north or south. This, I am sure, is a matter of contention, somewhere.