The Civil War: A Narrative. Volume I: Fort Sumter to Perryville

New York: Vintage Books, 1986. First Vintage Edition [stated]. Second Printing. Trade paperback. Good/No dust jacket issued. [6], 840, [12] pages. Wraps, volume 1 ONLY of the 3-vol. set. Color endpaper maps. Maps. Bibliographical Notes. Index. Stamp at bottom of fep. Shelby Dade Foote Jr. (November 17, 1916 - June 27, 2005) was an American writer, historian and journalist. Although he primarily viewed himself as a novelist, he is now best known for his authorship of The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the American Civil War. With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. Foote was little known to the general public until his appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990, where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was "central to all our lives." Foote did all his writing by hand with a nib pen, later transcribing the result into a typewritten copy. He received a letter from Bennett Cerf of Random House asking him to write a short history of the Civil War to appear for the conflict's centennial. According to Foote, Cerf contacted him based on the factual accuracy and rich detail he found in Shiloh. Although the novelist had no experience writing serious history, Cerf offered him a contract for a work of approximately 200,000 words. Foote described himself as a "novelist-historian" who accepted "the historian's standards without his paraphernalia" and "employed the novelist's methods without his license." He served on the Naval Academy Advisory Board in the 1980s. This first volume of Shelby Foote's classic narrative of the Civil War opens with Jefferson Davis's farewell to the United Senate and ends on the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Perryville, as the full, horrible scope of America's great war becomes clear. Exhaustively researched and masterfully written, Foote's epic account of the Civil War unfolds like a classic novel. Includes maps throughout. "Here, for a certainty, is one of the great historical narratives...a unique and brilliant achievement, one that must be firmly placed in the ranks of the masters."--Van Allen Bradley, Chicago Daily News. "A stunning book full of color, life, character and a new atmosphere of the Civil War, and at the same time a narrative of unflagging power. Eloquent proof that an historian should be a writer above all else." --Burke Davis
"To read this great narrative is to love the nation, to love it through the living knowledge of its mortal division. Whitman, who ultimately knew and loved the bravery and frailty of the soldiers, observed that the real Civil War would never be written and perhaps should not be. For me, Shelby Foote has written it.... This work was done to last forever." --James M. Cox, Southern Review. Derived from a Kirk's review: The first of three volumes bids to be a definitive history. He has viewed the facts exhaustively, through primary sources, contemporary writing and the recreation of the most gifted of the historians and biographers. Quite evidently, it is war as it was manipulated by the men in key positions, for almost consistently one sees action as he sees it through the generals and their lieutenants. The telling starts with the two political and ideological leaders:-Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln; and with the contretemps which precipitated the firing on Fort Sumter. He has taken the men; he has followed the tortuous pattern of war, throughout its sprawling lines, war on land and war on water; he has recounted the battles, distilling the essence by the novelist's creative processes, seeking, he says, as a novelist the same truth sought by the historian. Furthermore, while one concedes an extraordinary objectivity in view of his background as a Mississippi, his gift for respecting the opponent worthy of his steel, he is unfortunately all too ready to accept some of the less palatable aspects of Lincoln's shortcomings. But he cuts some of the glamour away from some of the Southern heroes, too. This first volume, ending as it does shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, leaves the reader aware that while history writes the South's defeat, the first two years wrote a balance of victory — with the writing on the wall only faintly decipherable.