Fun Facts Friday: Shelby Foote

Shelby Foote (17 November, 1916 – 27 June, 2005) was an American historian and novelist known for his landmark work on the American Civil War.

Books by Shelby Foote*

1. ShelbyDade Foote was born in Greenville, MS, as the only child of a local businessman.
2. Isaac Shelby, a leader in the American revolution and first and fifth governor of Kentucky was a relative.
3. Hezekiah William Foote, slave owner and confederate soldier was the author’s great-grandfather.
4. Two of his favorite authors were Shakespeare and Dickens.
5. Even though he wrote short stories and poems for the literary magazine of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he dropped out without graduating.
6. As a soldier in the United States Army (1940 – 1944), Mr. Foote served as a battery captain of field artillery in Europe. He was discharged after getting caught sneaking off to Belfast, Ireland, to visit a girlfriend.
7. The Civil War: A Narrative started when Random House wanted a short account of the American Civil War, this undertaking turned into a 2,934-page, three-volume, 1.5 million-word military history project which took sixteen years (1958 – 1974) to write.
8. To those who said that it took him five times as long to write about the war as the soldiers took to fight it, Mr. Foote replied “there were a good many more of them than there was of me.”
9. Foote wanted to tell of the American Civil War in a detailed, yet humane, way.
10. He had 89 cameos on Ken Burns’s series “The Civil War”

Books by Shelby Foote*

Zohar — Man of la Book
*Ama­zon links point to an affil­i­ate account