A storyteller and a scholar
A week after the death of famed Civil War historian Shelby Foote, New Yorker reporter Field Maloney writes about the author’s nuanced life and the lingering political fragmentation his death brought to light in Slate magazine. The author of the three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, Foote began writing history in an interlude between fiction works — yet what was to be a short history turned into a 20-year project that yielded 1.5 million words. Maloney also explores the late author’s view on the Bush administration, and his place in the ethos of the Old South: “Foote came to history out of the tradition of the Southern storyteller, but his achievement as a researcher and archivist shouldn’t be overlooked. He wanted to recreate the war in all its immediacy — he went so far as to camp out at battlegrounds on the anniversary of battles so he could capture the exact conditions of fighting.
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