| Shelby Foote has received considerable praise for his three-volume history of the Civil War. That is as it should be, for TheCivilWar: ANarrative is a well-researched, authoritative history even though, when the first and second volumes appeared in 1958 and 1963, professional historians questioned the adequacy of documentation. The voice in TheCivilWar is not that of a social scientist reporting the conclusions of his research, and the work is more than a history, an account of events. It is an engaging, well-told narrative; and more, it is a carefully designed and meticulously constructed work of literary art. Foote developed the artistry consciously through hard work, beginning with his first efforts in the high school newspaper in Greenville, Mississippi, continuing with the stories and reviews published in TheCarolinaMagazine, and continuing through the five novels he published before he began work on the history. The basic form of TheCivilWar resulted from years of experimentation, and even though the artistic structure for the history was set from the beginning of his work, the narrative strength of his style continued to develop over the twenty years of his writing. |
| Language is always a concern for the writer, for, after all, if the writer is an artist, then language is his medium. Art, particularly that made from the written word, is the means by which Western civilization has preserved what is most fundamental to its sense of self. The written word for Shelby Foote has heightened value as the medium for art. For him, to be sure, the word is not to be found in a computer file or on the typed page, or even in the printed book. These are all derivations from the hand-written manuscript crafted in careful calligraphy made with a dip-pen and India ink. His texts are highly crafted artifacts that he has taken pains to shape by hand, and they have the look of medieval manuscripts. |
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