One of my four favorite historians of all time, Shelby Foote, died Monday night. He was 88.
The native Mississippian gained an unusual sort of celebrity status when he lent his bearded visage, gravelly voice and good natured story-telling to Ken Burns' PBS documentary series "The Civil War," but I will always appreciate him most for the three-volume, 3,000-page history of the Civil War that took him 20 years to write. That work, the finest I've ever read (in part as well as in whole), had not been widely read before Foote's appearance in the PBS series, but it has since come into its own. In fact, in 1999, the Modern Library ranked The Civil War: A Narrative as No. 15 on its list of the 100 best English-language works of the 20th century.
Here's a few noteworthy articles on Shelby Foote you might like to read through: a brief bio on the Mississippi Writers page; an interesting collection of comments from Foote given to Humanities magazine in 2000; an interview article from The American Enterprise; and finally, the transcript of a 1994 Booknotes conversation between Foote and Brian Lamb.
