Shelby Foote

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Shelby Foote (born November 17, 1916 in Greenville , Mississippi , † June 27, 2005 in Memphis , Tennessee ) was an American novelist and historian . His three-volume work on the Civil War is considered to be one of the best representations of this topic, both in terms of style and content.

life and work

Shelby Foote was the son of the businessman Shelby Dade Foote (1891-1922) and his wife Lilian, nee Rosenstock. His grandfather Huger Lee Foote (1856–1915) was a planter in Greenville, his great-grandfather Hezekiah William Foote (1813–1899) was a Confederation cavalry officer and participant in the Battle of Shiloh . One of Foote's direct ancestors is Isaac Shelby , the first governor of Kentucky .

Shelby Foote attended the University of North Carolina (1935-1937) and in 1939 joined the United States National Guard . He then served as captain of an artillery unit during World War II , before being discharged from the army in 1944 due to unauthorized absence from the troops in Northern Ireland - he had visited his girlfriend (and future wife) Tess Lavery. Nevertheless, he served again in the armed forces from January to November 1945, this time in the Marine Corps .

After the war he worked in various professions, including for the Delta Democrat Times newspaper . In 1949 he published his first novel, Tournament . Other publications followed, including the civil war novel Shiloh , which earned Foote a reputation for being one of the best young novelists in the country after World War II. In 1953 he moved to Memphis, and in 1956 he wrote a story for Stanley Kubrick . He was friends with Walker Percy .

Despite his success as a novelist, Foote should celebrate his greatest success with a non-fiction book. In 1954, Foote, who had been interested in the American Civil War all his life, began work on a history of the conflict, the consequences of which continued to play a prominent role in the collective memory of Americans long after the fighting ended. He had been encouraged to do this work by the Random House publishing house , which he was able to finance with a Guggenheim grant in 1955 (also in 1956 and 1959). Work on the work dragged on longer than planned: In 1958 the first volume of The Civil War: A Narrative ( Fort Sumter to Perryville ) appeared; Foote had worked on it eight hours a day, seven days a week. The second was published in 1963 ( Fredericksburg to Meridian ) and finally, also delayed due to the domestic political situation in the USA in the 1960s and early 1970s, the third and final volume ( Red River to Appomattox ) in 1974 .

The monumental work (around 3,000 pages long) was received very positively. Although Foote himself was not a professional historian, the three volumes represent an accurate, comprehensive and, above all, stylistically extremely successful treatise. However, Foote's sympathies were a little more towards the south than the north, although this was not at the expense of objectivity. In addition, he repeatedly spoke out against racism and in the 1960s took a public position against proponents of racial segregation. He also served as one of the consultants for the award-winning and highly successful PBS documentary The Civil War (1990); through his appearances in the documentary, he became known to a wider public nationwide.

Foote has also taught at various universities, including the University of Virginia and Memphis State University . His marriages to Tess Lavery, and later to Peggy DeSommes, ended in divorce; since 1956 Foote was married to Gwyn Rainer (1930-2009) and had two children: son Huger Lee and daughter Margaret. Foote died at the age of 88 and was buried in Elmwood Cemetery , Memphis.

Publications

(in selection)

Film adaptations

  • 1991: Kidnapped: Seven Days of Fear ( Memphis ) - based on the novel "September, September"

literature

  • C. Stuart Chapman: Shelby Foote. A writer's life. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson MS 2003, ISBN 1-578-06359-0 .
  • James E. Kibler Jr .: Shelby Foote. In: Robert Bain, Joseph M. Flora, Louis D. Rubin (Eds.): Southern Writers. A Biographical Dictionary. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA et al. 1979, ISBN 0-8071-0390-X , pp. 161-163.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Douglas Martin: Shelby Foote, Historian and Novelist, Dies at 88. In: The New York Times, June 29, 2005 (accessed May 4, 2014).
  2. ^ Kibler Jr., Shelby Foote , p. 161.
  3. ↑ See also Douglas Mitchell, "The Conflict is Behind Me Now": Shelby Foote Writes the Civil War , in: The Southern Literary Journal , Vol. 36, No. 1 (2003), pp. 21-45.
  4. ↑ See the afterword by Foote in Vol. 1 and the comment by James M. McPherson , Die Für die Freiheit , Augsburg 2003 (orig. New York 1988), p. 964.
  5. ↑ Shelby Foote in the Find a Grave database (accessed May 5, 2014).
personal data
SURNAME Foote, Shelby
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American novelist and historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Greenville
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 2005
Place of death Memphis