Portal:American Civil War/Selected biography/36

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Shelby Foote (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) was a noted American author and historian of the American Civil War. Foote was born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, the largest city in the primarily agrarian region called the Mississippi Delta; he attended the University of North Carolina but did not graduate before entering the United States Army in 1940.

After being discharged from the military, Foote was briefly a journalist. However, he began writing historical fiction, mostly set in the period surrounding the American Civil War. Although he never completed college or received formal training as a historian, Foote's ability to create a realistic portrayal of the American Civil War — factually accurate, richly detailed, and entering into the minds of men on both sides — led his editors at Random House to invite him to write a short history of the war to appear for the conflict's centennial.

Foote subsequently wrote a comprehensive three volume, 3000-page history of the American Civil War, together entitled The Civil War: A Narrative, which is considered by many to be a classic. The individual volumes include Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963), and Red River to Appomattox (1974).