The things you find on the internet. The unedited interviews by Ken Burns of Shelby Foote for The Civil War. Hard to believe it is 31 years since the series was broadcast. I recall it as if it were yesterday.
I have read the three volume history of the Civil War written by Shelby Foote, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has not. Combining the skills of a novelist with those of a keen historian, Foote brings to life the American Iliad.
“The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.”
the interview Shelby Foote did with CSPAN’s Brian Lamb on the occasion of release of the Walker Percy and Shelby Foote correspondence. Walker Percy being the great Southern Catholic writer. Percy and Foote were lifelong friends. The interview and letters are excellent. The video is available on CSPAN’s website.
Having just completed Bruce Catton’s three volume Centennial history of the Civil War, Shelby Foote’s three volume series is next on my list. I expect it will be an interesting read.
Catton’s three volume history of the Army of the Potomac is well worth a read also, as is Foote’s novel on the battle of Shiloh.