And I really do think that the difficulty of research makes it more real to you than punching a thing to find out how many men were killed at this particular action.
And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and quality you can imagine, and that was a good experience.
During that year while we were waiting to be inducted into federal service, I wrote the first draft of my first novel, Tournament.
Getting close to books, and spending time by myself, I was obliged to think about things I would never have thought about if I was busy romping around with a brother and sister.
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
I did Shiloh, but before I could get around to doing the big Vicksburg novel, I was going on the non-fiction Civil War, so I never came back to them.
I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper.
I had intended, at that time, to do three Civil War books, two short ones and a long one. First would be Shiloh. The long one would be the Siege of Vicksburg, and the third one was going to be Brice's Crossroads.
I never cared what kind of grade I got.
I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.
I ran into Ku Klux Klan and the threat of hurricanes, and those two things made me decide not to build on the Alabama coast, so we came back to Memphis.
I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.
I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.
I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
I'm crazy about Grant: his character, his nature, his science in fighting and everything else. But I don't like the idea that he never accepted the blame for anything, always found someone else to blame for any mistake that was ever made, including blaming Prentiss for Shiloh.
I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.
If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
In the first place I've learned that the harder it was for me to learn something, the longer it would stay with me.
Loneliness is one of the best things in the world for you. You do something about it: read, for instance, all kind of things, make friends.
Longevity conquers scandal every time.
Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves.
My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.
Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.
Shiloh is a wonderfully dramatic battle. The leader of one side is killed, and the other one is going on to glory, and it was the first great battle. It lasted two days.
What really alarms me about the computer is I say you no longer need a brain. You just need a finger to push for information.
When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.
Picking any one moment or place is a romantic approach to history that I'm uneasy about. Singling out any one event from history as all-important. Every event is led up to by so many others, small and large. Besides, what you think about and where you'd want to go keeps changing.
Right now I'm thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery. Another was emancipation. It's a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy-and it was. But the way it was done led to tragedy. Turning four million people loose with no jobs or trades or learning. And then, in 1877, for a few electoral votes, just abandoning them entirely. A huge amount of pain and trouble resulted. Everybody in America is still paying for it.
It would be nice to talk to Lincoln. He'd really talk to you. Maybe run circles around you. Not like others who you figure would be mostly rhetoric.
History is a pretty wretched subject to study in school. As I remember it, it was terrible. They required me to memorize so many things. There was a Treaty of Utrecht, and it has thirteen steps. I don't know one of those steps. But it had thirteen.
Plot makes a story move under its own power. And to neglect plotting as a device of history is a serious mistake. Among American historians, probably my favorite is Francis Parkman. Parkman's a wonderful historian. I had not read him until late in life to realize how good he was.
People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.
The Marines had a great time with me. They said if you used to be a captain, you might make a pretty good Marine.
God is the greatest dramatist.
Historian and author. His 3-volume set "The Civil War: A Narrative" is one of the standard reference works on the subject.
He joined the Mississippi National Guard as a protest to Hitler's war. His writings were interrupted when the guard was mobilized by draft in the year 1940. By 1942, Foote was commissioned and promoted to Captain. However, while at a base in Northern Ireland, Shelby was accused of insubordination because he was in Belfast without leave, visiting the Irish girl whom he later married. In 1944, Shelby Foote was court martialed and dismissed from the service.
Foote remained relatively unknown before his role in Ken Burns' "The Civil War", a PBS documentary series first broadcast in 1990 which made him a cultural icon. Since that event, Foote has become widely viewed as an authority on the Civil War, and more generally, as a representative of an era and region whose place continues to be central to our country's understanding of itself.
He has been awarded three Guggenheim fellowships.
Attended the University of North Carolina from 1935 to 1937.
Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 159-162. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.
After being discharged from the Army during World War II, he joined the Marines. He never saw combat.
Children: daughter Margaret (second marriage) and son Huger (first marriage).
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