Authors: Shelby Foote, William C. Carter
ISBN-13: 9780878053865, ISBN-10: 0878053867
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Date Published: March 1989
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Shelby Foote once said that he did not know of anything he had learned about the writing of novels that couldn't also be applied to the writing of history. In his development, the merging of these special talents has made Foote almost unique in the history of American literature, for few other great modern authors have proved to be master storytellers in both fiction and historical narrative.
In Conversations with Shelby Foote, this novelist-historian expresses penetrating and often humorous remarks about major modern writers as well as about the classical writers of fiction, plays, poetry, and historical narrative. In one interview Foote explains how Homer's Iliad and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past were his chief models for writing his history of the Civil War.
Foote recounts also what it was like to grow up in a small Mississippi town in the first half of the twentieth century and tells how his observations of African Americans and whites of all classes influenced his fiction and history writing.
These eighteen interviews spanning thirty-seven years not only detail Shelby Foote's exploration of southern history, race relations, and the role of literature in the formation and preservation of a culture but also reveal his evolution into a great narrative artist.
Insights into Foote's writing through interviews done between 1950 and 1987 (most of which have appeared previously, though in widely scattered publications). Contains much comment on Faulkner. Cloth edition (not seen) $27.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Introduction | vii | |
Chronology | xv | |
Shelby Foote, Greenville Author, Says Writing Is His Hardest Job | 3 | |
Talk with Shelby Foote | 5 | |
Shelby Foote Hopes to Put Flesh and Blood of Memphis on Paper | 8 | |
Foote-Note on Faulkner | 12 | |
Writer's Home Has Windows on Past, Present | 15 | |
Writer Critical of 'Tokenism' in South | 18 | |
It's Worth a Grown Man's Time: An Interview with Shelby Foote | 21 | |
Talking with Shelby Foote | 56 | |
Interview with Shelby Foote | 77 | |
Shelby Foote's Love Affair with Civil War Began in '54 | 103 | |
WKNO Presents a Conversation with Shelby Foote | 112 | |
Appomattox for Shelby Foote | 131 | |
Interview with Shelby Foote | 137 | |
Shelby Foote | 151 | |
A Colloquium with Shelby Foote | 196 | |
An Interview with Shelby Foote | 218 | |
Shelby Foote | 230 | |
Seeking the Truth in Narrative: An Interview with Shelby Foote | 241 | |
Index | 270 |