Fiction, History and Shelby Foote

Shelby Foote was a novelist before he was a historian, and at least one of those novels, Shiloh, was about the Civil War. Then he wrote the classic three-volume Narrative history of the war, and was the key talking head in Ken Burns' excellent PBS documentary.

A Facebook group I belong to, The Civil War Buff (as opposed to Da Buffs, an Albany, NY, dinner group to which I will make a presentation and try to sell books on Nov. 14), has been discussing Foote. While I think Foote's lack of footnotes is a legitimate issue for critics to raise, as well as, to a lesser extent, his inclination toward the Confederate side of the conflict, I still defend him as one of the war's great historians. He wrote well, with a vivid and accurate sense of the great drama of those events, while rigorously pursuing the truth as he saw it.

While most people on the Facebook thread were admirers of Foote, others said fiction "overlapped" into the history, or compared him unfavorably to another historian who "has a PhD and taught history at the University of Virginia. Shelby Foote wrote books."

I said this: "Shelby Foote's imagination made him a better historian. Not because he made it up, but because, as David McCullough pointed out, a historian needs to imagine what life was like for the people he writes about. He needs to get inside their heads."

And there are limits to biography.