Shelby Foote (1916-2005) was one the greatest American writers—one of the greatest Jewish American writers. His trilogy The Civil War: A Narrative, published between 1958 and 1974, is to history what Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (Foote’s favorite and most-read book) is to the novel, masterful in its staggering scope, architectonic sentences, and dazzling reversals of perspective and characterization. Descended, on his father’s side, from Mississippi Delta planters, including a Confederate commander at the battle of Shiloh, Foote played in public the blue-blooded raconteur. His appearance in Ken Burns’ The Civil War documentary in 1990 made him, for millions of viewers, synonymous with a genteel unctuousness imagined as typical of elite Southern whites.
Of his mother’s family—Vienna Jews who came to the Delta town of Greenville late in the 19th century—he rarely spoke, although, his father having died when he was 5, it was they who had raised him. Greenville’s small, bustling Jewish community, documented in the writing of its other most notable son, David Cohn (Where I Was Born and Raised, God Shakes Creation, The Mississippi Delta and the World), its synagogue, which he attended until the age of 11, and the inner life of its members hardly appear in Foote’s writing; he cannot be called a “Jewish novelist” in the sense meant for his contemporaries like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud.
He lived his Jewishness not as membership in a faith or a community but as something uncomfortable, half-secret, to be concealed or escaped. This may have been just what enabled him to become our country’s greatest student of Proust, whose biographical similarities to himself Foote surely understood and never discussed with interviewers. Foote was never more than a second-rate novelist—whether Southern, Jewish, or anything else—but, after a two-year writer’s block put him at the precipice of suicide, he applied himself to history as one of the most masterful stylists in American letters, doing in nonfiction what he could not do in fiction, and letting himself in the process be mistaken for the archetype of the pure-bred Southerner.
