Shelby Foote

Shelby Foote was born in 1916 in Greenville, Mississippi, into a family with deep roots in the Mississippi Delta. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but left without a degree. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, including a stint in combat intelligence, he returned to the South and began writing fiction. His early novels, including Shiloh and Follow Me Down, established him as a gifted novelist of the American South. In 1954, he began work on his three-volume narrative history of the Civil War, a project that would consume twenty years of his life and produce nearly three thousand pages of densely researched, elegantly written narrative. He wrote the entire work in longhand with a dip pen, producing roughly five hundred words a day. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by The Civil War.