Shelby Foote found himself elevated to celebrity status following his multiple appearances in Ken Burns', The Civil War in 1990. In that 11-hour documentary, Foote was seen in 89 segments, dominating substantial screen time. His gravelly southern drawl and compelling storytelling made him a favorite with the public. He had spent 20 years of his life writing his three-volume, 1.65-million word The Civil War: A Narrative, which had been well received, but criticized for its lack of footnotes and omission of economic and racial themes. After the documentary, though, each volume started selling 1,000 copies a day. By the next year, his history of the war had sold 400,000 copies. "Ken," he said to the filmmaker, "you've made me a millionaire."

A Southern novelist, Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. was born in 1916 in Greenville, Mississippi, and his upbringing and family background were entrenched in the Mississippi Delta. His great-grandfather, Hezekiah William Foote, was a confederate colonel at the Battle of Belmont and the Battle of Shiloh, as well as an attorney and district judge who also served in the state legislature and senate, and he owned four plantations.

Foote's Early Years

Foote edited his high school newspaper in Greenville and learned about administrators who take themselves seriously. He would often satirize his principal in print, and found his application rejected when he applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill because of a negative reference letter from that principal. Despite that petty revenge, he was finally accepted after taking a strenuous series of admissions tests. He dropped out after only two years. He preferred investigating subjects that interested him to the classes required for graduation.

He returned to Greenville in 1937, taking jobs in construction and with the local newspaper, and began work on his first novel. In 1940, he joined the Mississippi National Guard and was promoted to Captain of artillery before his battalion was sent to Northern Ireland in 1943. It was there that he was court martialed. He was charged with falsifying documents after he used a vehicle from the motor pool to visit his girlfriend in Belfast and falsified the paperwork regarding the return of that vehicle.

After returning to Greenville, he started writing and completed five novels in six years, all set in Mississippi. Tournament, his first book, is loosely based on the life of his grandfather, who was a southern planter. Follow Me Down is a fictionalized version of the story behind a murder trial that he attended in Greenville, while his third novel, Love in a Dry Season explores themes of the Mississippi upper classes durning the Great Depression. Shiloh uses 17 different narrators to tell the story of the bloodiest battle, up to that point, of the Civil War. It has been argued that Shiloh favored the Confederacy as a cause for constitutional freedoms while disregarding the core subject of slavery, a criticism that would apply to much of Foote's work.

he started writing and completed five novels in six years

His fifth novel, Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative, is a collection of stories set in the mythical southern county, similar in some ways to the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner's work. Faulkner seemed to have noticed it too. Stuart Chapman reports in Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life, (2003) that Faulkner once told a class that Foote "shows promise, if he'll just stop trying to write Faulkner, and will write some Shelby Foote."

Shelby Foote and the Civil War

In 1954, the centennial of the end of the Civil War was approaching and Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House publishing company, was looking for someone to write a relatively short (200,000 words) history of the war. He had noticed Foote's style and detail in his writing of Shiloh and contacted him. After a meeting and a $400 advance, Foote's plan was to finish the project quickly and return to fiction writing.

After a meeting and a $400 advance, Foote's plan was to finish the project quickly and return to fiction writing

Foote read history after history, visited battlefields, absorbed the 128-volume Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, and decided that the project could not be done to Cerf's specifications. He proposed a three-volume treatment of 1.5 million words to be completed in nine years.

It took him 20, and the result was a narrative-style history unlike previous publications about the war, employing novelist's sensibilities rather than those of historians. That style made the work very approachable for readers, though historians felt it somewhat unprofessional. He deliberately omitted footnotes, saying that they would "detract from the book's narrative quality by intermittently shattering the illusion that the observer is not so much reading a book as sharing an experience." ("The Conflict is Behind Me Now," Douglas, 2003.)

Foote and Tobacco

During the 20 years of writing his magnum opus, Foote was smoking his pipes, just as the soldiers who fought in that war smoked pipes. In his 1997 interview with Pipes and tobaccos magazine, he relates how important tobacco was to soldiers:

Also in that interview, Foote provided some detail about his own pipe smoking history: "I started smoking when I was 13 or 14 and I wanted to be grown-up. I actually started with a pipe, which was kind of strange."

The Confederates had tobacco and the Northerners had coffee, and they used to swap whenever there was a truce

Writer Richard Alley is a former tobacco shop owner who provided tobacco for Foote, and he describes his experiences with the famous novelist in a 2011 post on his blog, uurrff.blogspot.com:

The Paris Review interview more specifically identifies Foot's tobacco: "During the interview, Foote sat at his desk or paced to and fro in his slippers, frequently refilling his pipe from a humidor with a mixture of Half & Half and Edward G. Robinson tobacco."

Foote sat at his desk or paced to and fro in his slippers, frequently refilling his pipe from a humidor with a mixture of Half & Half and Edward G. Robinson tobacco

In a thread on Pipesmagazine.com, Jim Amash, cartoonist extraordinaire and among the most accomplished pipe tobacco reviewers ever to strike a match, and who personally lead the campaign that saved Edward G. Robinson tobacco from discontinuing production, reveals his own story of further identifying Foote's tobacco:

According to Jim, Foote's mixture evolved from two-thirds Edward G. Robinson and one-third that varied between Sir Walter Raleigh and Half & Half, to eventually becoming the same proportions of Edward G. Robinson with Barking Dog. Foote himself said in the 1997 P&T interview, "I've used exactly the same tobacco for over 50 years. It's called Edward G. Robinson.... Edward G. is such a fine tobacco that it packs too tight in a pipe, so I mix it with a rough-cut tobacco, about one-third of the rough cut, two-thirds of the Edward G, which makes just what I like."

About Pipe Smoking

Foote didn't smoke a pipe while writing, but instead smoked cigarettes, saving his pipes for off-work hours. He told Pipes and tobaccos about the number of cigarettes he smoked: "I spent 20 years writing those three volumes of the Civil War and I calculated one day, just for the fun of it, that at the rate of a pack and a half a day — which is really a rather low estimate because I nearly always had a cigarette in my lip and a pen in my right hand while I was working — that I smoked 150,000 regular, unfiltered Chesterfields. And I'm here to testify to it.... With a pipe I try never to smoke while I am writing because the thing goes out every now and then. But it's a pipe I smoke while I'm reading or studying or doing anything like that."

In 1989, Foote was told to stop smoking by his doctors. "I said I'd quit cigarettes, but I wasn't about to give up my pipe. They said that was a decent compromise. So I smoke nothing but a pipe and a very occasional cigar."

While the author is often shown smoking a pipe in photos and even in his own books, he professed in 1989 in "Conversations with Shelby Foote" by William C Carter to disliking the image: "But to Shelby Foote, the image of himself as the pipe-smoking writer is particularly distasteful. 'I hate it so much,' he says, in a voice made in the Mississippi Delta, 'I hate it so much that I have refused to be photographed with a pipe in my mouth.'"

He smoked straight pipes and didn't like bents. "For some reason I don't really understand," he said in the P&T interview, "saliva collects in a curved pipe. For me anyhow. Then it gets to bubbling, like a stew." He also states that his collection is "mostly Comoy's and Dunhills, and that Italian one, I never can remember the name of them." He started, though, with Kaywoodies, and then became infatuated with GBDs, "then finally moved up to Dunhill. I've got perhaps 100 pipes. A lot of them have been sent to me by people who liked my work on the Civil War."

The Civil War is what Shelby Foote will be most remembered for, despite his insistence that he was a novelist rather than a historian. His southern drawl was smooth and his personal charm did much to elevate the documentary that made him famous. Foote passed away in Memphis in June of 2005 at age 88. While his views will remain controversial, he succeeded in making the individual and personal stories of the Civil War accessible and brought those tales of tragedy and triumph into the modern world with the skills and insights one would expect of a talented pipe smoker.

References:

• "Civil Discourse," Pipes and tobaccos, (Fall 1997), by Larrry O'Connor.
• Conversations with Shelby Foote (1989), by William C. Carter
• "Shelby Foote, The Art of Fiction No. 158," The Paris Review (Summer 1999), by Carter Coleman, Donald Faulkner, and William Kennedy.
• "The Conflict Is behind Me Now: Shelby Foote Writes the Civil War," The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 36, no. 1 (2003) by Mitchell, Douglas.
• URF! Blog
• Civil War Wikia
• Real Clear History
• Civil Rights Museum
• Pipes Magazine