50 Facts About Shelby Foote

Shelby 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".

Shelby Foote did all his writing by hand with a nib pen, later transcribing the result into a typewritten copy.

Shelby Foote's paternal grandfather, Huger Lee Shelby Foote was a planter who gambled away most of his assets.

Shelby Foote's maternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna.

Shelby Foote attended synagogue each Saturday with his mother until the age of eleven.

Shelby Foote moved frequently as his father was promoted within the Armour and Company, living in Greenville, Jackson, and Vicksburg, Mississippi; Pensacola, Florida; and Mobile, Alabama.

When Shelby Foote was five, his father died in Mobile, and his mother moved them back to Greenville.

When Shelby Foote was 15 years old, he began lifelong friendships with Walker Percy and his brothers.

Additional influences on Shelby Foote's writing were Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon and Proust.

At Greenville High School, Shelby Foote edited the student newspaper, The Pica, and frequently used it to lampoon the school's principal.

Shelby Foote was only able to get in by passing a round of admission tests.

Shelby Foote often skipped class to explore the library, even spending a night among the shelves.

Shelby Foote began contributing pieces of fiction to Carolina Magazine, UNC's award-winning literary journal.

Shelby Foote returned to Greenville in 1937, where he worked in construction and for a local newspaper Delta Democrat Times.

In 1940, Shelby Foote joined the Mississippi National Guard and was commissioned as captain of artillery.

Shelby Foote's battalion was deployed to Northern Ireland in 1943.

Shelby Foote was charged with falsifying a government document relating to the check-in of a vehicle he borrowed to visit his girlfriend in Belfast.

Shelby Foote got a job with the Associated Press in New York City.

Shelby Foote returned to Greenville and took a job with a local radio station.

Shelby Foote spent most of his time writing and submitted part of his first novel to The Saturday Evening Post.

In Shiloh, Shelby Foote developed his use of historical narrative to tell the story of the bloodiest battle in American history to that point.

Shelby Foote worked on an epic called Two Gates to the City that he had begun outlining in 1951.

Shelby Foote was struggling with the "dark, horrible novel" when Bennett Cerf of Random House asked Foote to write a short history of the Civil War.

Shelby Foote worked for several weeks on an outline and decided that Cerf's specifications were too small.

Shelby Foote visited battlefields and read widely: standard biographies, campaign studies, and recent books by Hudson Strode, Bruce Catton, James G Randall, Clifford Dowdey, T Harry Williams, Kenneth M Stampp and Allan Nevins.

Shelby Foote mined the primary sources in the 128-volume Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.

Shelby Foote developed new respect for such disparate figures as Ulysses S Grant, William T Sherman, Patrick Cleburne, Edwin Stanton and Jefferson Davis.

Shelby Foote was criticized for his lack of interest in more current historical research, and for a less firm grasp of politics than of military affairs.

Shelby Foote relied extensively on the work of Hudson Strode, whose sympathy for Lost Cause claims resulted in a portrait of Jefferson Davis as a tragic hero without many of the flaws attributed to him by other historians.

Shelby Foote kept Nathan Bedford Forrest's portrait on his wall and lauded him as "one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history".

Shelby Foote dismissed Forrest's role in the Fort Pillow Massacre.

Shelby Foote suggested the general had tried to prevent the massacre, despite evidence to the contrary.

Shelby Foote somehow compared the great emancipator with a man who owned slaves, murdered blacks and joined the Ku Klux Klan.

Shelby Foote retained complex, patriarchal and sympathetic views of African Americans and race relations.

Shelby Foote supported school integration, opposed Eisenhower's hands-off approach to Southern racism, and championed Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Shelby Foote served on the Naval Academy Advisory Board in the 1980s.

Shelby Foote was not in this initial group, though Burns had Shelby Foote's trilogy on his reading list.

In November 1986, Shelby Foote figured prominently at a meeting of dozens of consultants gathered to critique Burns' script.

Many Memphis natives were known to pay Shelby Foote a visit at his East Parkway residence in Midtown Memphis.

In 1992, Shelby Foote received an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina.

Shelby Foote was a member of The Modern Library's editorial board for the re-launch of the series in the mid-1990s, this series published two books excerpted from his Civil War narrative.

Shelby Foote contributed a long introduction to their edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, giving a narrative biography of the author.

Shelby Foote received the 1992 St Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates.

Shelby Foote was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994.

Also in 1994, Shelby Foote joined Protect Historic America and was instrumental in opposing a Disney theme park near battlefield sites in Virginia.

Shelby Foote campaigned in the 2001 referendum on the Flag of Mississippi, arguing against a proposal which would have replaced the Confederate battle flag with a blue canton with 20 stars.

In 2003, Foote received the Peggy V Helmerich Distinguished Author Award.

Shelby Foote died at Baptist Hospital in Memphis on June 27,2005, aged 88.

Shelby Foote had had a heart attack after a recent pulmonary embolism.

Shelby Foote's grave is beside the family plot of General Forrest.