Shelby Foote and the Art of History: Two Gates to the City

Ken Burns, creator of the television documentary The Civil War, has called Shelby Foote a “national treasure.” Foote, whose appearances on the program helped solidify its phenomenal success, earned a reputation among the general public as one of the nation’s leading Civil War historians. His three-volume history of the Civil War is considered by some to be among the most engaging treatments of the conflict to date—Walker Percy called it “an American Illiad”—and his novels, which straddle the…