Shelby Foote, one of the giants of Southern literature, passed away on June 27 at his home in Memphis at the age of 88.  An unapologetic Mississippian, Foote never finished college but had much more valuable experiences—he grew up with another world-class Southern writer, Walker Percy, and, as a young man, played tennis on William Faulkner’s court.

Foote began and ended his writing career as a novelist, but two decades of his productive middle years were spent composing the three volumes of The Civil War: A Narrative, on which his fame will rest.

It is a bit ironic that, in his later years, Foote achieved a measure of celebrity (with which he was reportedly uncomfortable) by his appearance on the notorious federally subsidized Ken Burns Civil War television “documentary.”  Foote’s knowledge and charm, together with the intrinsic appeal of the real Civil War material presented, were all that redeemed  Burns’ slanted, self-indulgent p.c.-fest.  Burns, in accord with his usual operating mode, filmed Foote for several days and then cut and pasted pieces as he pleased to fit into his preconceived script.  Foote made clear later that he was not aware of Burns’ interpretations when he participated in the program and that he did not share them.  (The leftist African-American historian Barbara Fields once told me, in conversation on Gene and Betsey Genovese’s back veranda, that she, too, felt misused by Burns’ methods.)

During a lecture at the University of South Carolina at the height of the controversy over flying the Confederate Flag on the state capitol dome, Foote surprised his naively liberal audience by opining that the flag ought to be left where it was.

I cannot better say what is to be said about Foote the writer than by repeating some of what I wrote in 1980 under the title “American Iliad”: “Our Civil War contains more dramatic events, unforgettable personalities, and crucial issues than any other part of the American experience.  No other event in our history occurred with such vast scale and complexity and is so pregnant with import for our self-understanding as a people.  It is deserving of an epic treatment, as, indeed, Walt Whitman predicted more than a century ago, it must inevitably produce.  Foote’s history is that epic. . . . It is said that the American Civil War has generated more printed words than any event in the history of the globe except the life and works of Christ.  We have now reached the summit of this literature.  The Civil War: A Narrative is the best work that ever has been or ever will be written about the great war.  It is the place to begin and the place to end any study of America’s central experience.”