Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. was an American novelist and a noted historian of the American Civil War. With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta alluvium, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. Foote introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was "central to all our lives."Foote died at Baptist Hospital in Memphis on June 27, 2005, at the age of
Shelby Foote was a brilliant writer who made history not just educational but exciting.