Shelby Foote Books In Order

Civil War Books In Publication Order

  1. The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958)
  2. The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963)
  3. The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox (1974)
  4. Chickamauga and Other Civil War Stories (1993)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Tournament (1949)
  2. Follow Me Down (1950)
  3. Love in a Dry Season (1951)
  4. Shiloh (1952)
  5. September, September (1978)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Jordan County (1954)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Stars in Their Courses (1994)
  2. The Beleaguered City (1995)
  3. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy (1996)

Civil War Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Shelby Foote Books Overview

The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

‘This, then, is narrative history a kind of history that goes back to an older literary tradition…
. The writing is superb…
one of the historical and literary achievements of our time.’ The Washington Post Book World ‘Gettysburg…
is described with such meticulous attention to action, terrain, time, and the characters of the various commanders that I understand, at last, what happened in that battle…
. Mr. Foote has an acute sense of the relative importance of events and a novelist’s skill in directing the reader’s attention to the men and the episodes that will influence the course of the whole war, without omitting items which are of momentary interest. His organization of facts could hardly be better.’ Atlantic’Though the events of this middle year of the Civil War have been recounted hundreds of times, they have rarely been re created with such vigor and such picturesque detail.’ The New York Times Book Review’The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist’s feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian’s scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequaled.’ Walter Mills

The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

‘I have never read a better, more vivid, more understandable account of the savage battling between Grant’s and Lee’s armies…
. Foote stays with the human strife and suffering, and unlike most Southern commentators, he does not take sides. In objectivity, in range, in mastery of detail in beauty of language and feeling for the people involved, this work surpas*ses anything else on the subject…
. It stands alongside the work of the best of them.’ New Republic

Chickamauga and Other Civil War Stories

This long out of print anthology of Civil War stories by such authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe includes a new introduction and the addition of three new stories. Contributing writers include Stephen Crance, Ambrose Bierce, Eudora Welty, and Mark Twain.

Tournament

Tournament is Shelby Foote’s first novel, published originally by Dial Press in 1949. Summa’s reprint includes an exclusive preface by the author and an introduction by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., the dean of American literature criticism. Tournament is a brilliant novel of the post Civil War South, replete with Proustian and Faulknerian overtones. Many of the characters that appear in subsequent novels by Shelby Foote come onto the scene for the first time in this work. It is a must acquisition for every fan of Shelby Foote.

Follow Me Down

A mesmerizing novel of faith, passion, and murder by the author of The Civil War: A Narrative. Drawing on themes as old as the Bible, Foote’s novel compels us to inhabit lives obsessed with sin and starving for redemption. A work reminiscent of both Faulkner and O’Connor, yet utterly original.

Love in a Dry Season

‘A fascinating drama…
the atmosphere is superbly managed; and on every score, this is a first rate job of story telling.’ Philadelphia InquirerShelby Foote’s magnificently orchestrated novel anticipates much of the subject matter of his monumental Civil War trilogy, rendering the clash between North and South with a violence all the more shocking for its intimacy. Love in a Dry Season describes an erotic and economic triangle, in which two wealthy and fantastically unhappy Mississippi families the Barcrofts and the Carrutherses are joined by an open faced fortune hunter from the North, a man whose ruthlessness is matched only by his inability to understand the people he tries to exploit and his fatal incomprehension of the passions he so casually ignites. Combining a flawless sense of place with a Faulknerian command of the grotesque, Foote’s novel turns a small cotton town into a sexual battleground as fatal as Vicksburg or Shiloh and one where strategy is no match for instinct and tradition.

Shiloh

This fictional re creation of the battle of Shiloh in April 1862 fulfills the standard set by his monumental history, conveying both the bloody choreography of two armies and the movements of the combatants’ hearts and minds. From the Trade Paperback edition.

September, September

In September 1957 the South is mesmerized by events in Little Rock, Arkansas, whose governor has called out the National Guard as part of his attempt to halt the integration of Central High School. And in Memphis, two white men and a white woman are planning to capitalize on the confrontation between the races by kidnapping the grandson of a wealthy black entrepreneur and pinning the crime on white supremacists. The problem is that Podjo, Rufus, and Reeny have only an amateur’s understanding of what a kidnapping entails and a total, terrifying incomprehension of their victims. In September September a magisterial historian of the Civil War charts its distant repercussions in the streets of the contemporary South. By turns wryly comic, ribald, and chilling, Shelby Foote’s novel is at once a convincing thriller and a powerful tragicomedy of race. September September has been adapted by Larry McMurtry for the Turner Network Television film Memphis, starring Cybill Shepherd.

Jordan County

Before Shelby Foote under took his epic history of the Civil War, he wrote this fictional chronicle ‘a landscape in narrative’ of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations. The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ineffectual fin de siecle aristocrat, and a half wild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War. In prose of almost Biblical gravity; and with a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives and sometimes warps them beyond repair Foote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of fiction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor but that is resolutely unique.

Stars in Their Courses

Historian/novelist Foote’s masterly work has been culled from his critically acclaimed three volume narrative of the Civil War. 7 cassettes.

The Beleaguered City

The companion volume to Stars in Their Courses, this marvelous account of Grant’s siege of the Mississippi port of Vicksburg continues Foote’s narrative of the great battles of the Civil War culled from his massive three volume history recounting a campaign which Lincoln called ‘one of the most brilliant in the world.’

The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

Contains excerpts of the long running correspondence between comic moralist Walker Percy and novelist and historian Shelby Foote, from the beginnings of their careers in the late 1940s to Percy’s death in 1990.

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