Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life

I have to disagree with the earlier, anonymous reviewer who says this book is drivel. I found it an enlightening and well-written book that delivers a non-partisan message, but it is written by someone who truly admires Shelby Foote. What's wrong with that? Foote is a wonderful historian, even though as many have said his volumes on the Civil War tell the story almost entirely as one of big battles and great men. Chapman does not let his reverence for Foote's writings get in the way of telling a good story. And what a story! He came from the long-ago vanished South of the aristocrats, and along with his boyhood friend Walker Percy, who later became a celebrated novelist, the two of them tracked the changes in Southern society in their novels and other writings. Foote had his faults too, as Chapman notes ruefully: he exaggerated the depth of his friendship with the man he idolized, Nobel winner William Faulkner, who lived but a hundred miles away; he was a womanizer who just couldn't keep it in his pants; his relationship with his daughter Margaret, who became attached to the Seattle rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, was troubled to the point that he denied they were related; and his position on race relations wasn't a very activist one. Even his relationship with Percy was strained by the two men's seesawing careers and who was up. who was down, at any given moment. The Ken Burns thing happened at exactly the right time for Shelby Foote, and from now on, people would no longer be confusing him with Horton Foote--no relation. Chapman's "LIFE" makes me curious to see the publication of "TWO GATES TO THE CITY," the novel on which Shelby Foote again and again dashed his hopes, an unconquerable manuscript that was worth its weight in tears. Maybe someday we will see some version of it. Until then, we have all his other books to read and re-read at leisure.

A distinctively Southern voice explores a distinctively Southern figure in C. Stuart Chapman's portait of Shelby Foote. The book not only places Foote's work in context, it provides a literary glimpse into the South as a whole, not only during the Civil War era of Foote's best known works but the Civil Rights era as well. Foote clearly exemplifies the Burdens of Southern history -- both C. Vann Woodward's and Robert Penn Warren's varieties. Chapman gives us a fascinating look at a complicated man in his place and time.

Chapman's biography provides the reader with a fascinating insight into the complex mind of acclaimed author/historian Shelby Foote. Detailing the historical background and events that shaped Foote's upbringing and his ambitions as a novelist, Chapman draws clear connections between Foote's desire to reconcile his longstanding conceptions of aristocratic southern culture with the changing social and racial dynamics of the south during the civil rights era. This struggle is elucidated both within Foote's novels and in his three volume narrative of the Civil War. This book is an absolute must read for anyone who has watched the PBS series on the Civil War or has read Foote's civil war narrative.

Chapman deftly combines his knowledge of literature, politics and human nature with a sensitive and balanced handling of the events and emotional currents of Foote's life. The result is a highly readable, deeply informed, and thoroughly captivating narrative. Foote, neither set upon a pedestal by Chapman nor villified for ambivalence in a time of cataclysmic change, emerges whole and, over all, well-served by the author's erudition and compassion.

This is a great look at Foote's life including his sources of inspiration as an author. The in-depth analysis of Foote's fiction works was particularly insightful as it explored the various influences on Foote's many attempts at becoming the next Faulkner. Also interesting were the ways Chapman compared Foote's own experiences during the civil rights movement to his novel's characters, settings and experiences while comparing them to Foote's own conflicting views of civil rights. This is definitely going to be a definitive biography on Foote.