Foote's comprehensive history of the Civil War includes three compelling volumes: Fort Sumter to Perryville, Fredericksburg to Meridian, and Red River to Appomattox. Collected together in a handsome boxed set, this is the perfect gift for any Civil War buff.
Fort Sumter to Perryville
"Here, for a certainty, is one of the great historical narratives of our century, a unique and brilliant achievement, one that must be firmly placed in the ranks of the masters." --Van Allen Bradley, "Chicago Daily News"
"Anyone who wants to relive the Civil War, as thousands of Americans apparently do, will go through this volume with pleasure.... Years from now, Foote's monumental narrative most likely will continue to be read and remembered as a classic of its kind." --"New York Herald Tribune Book Review
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Fredericksburg to Meridian"
""This, then, is narrative history--a kind of history that goes back to an older literary tradition.... The writing is superb...one of the historical and literary achievements of our time." --"The Washington Post Book World"
"Gettysburg...is described with such meticulous attention to action, terrain, time, and the characters of the various commanders that I understand, at last, what happened in that battle.... Mr. Foote has an acute sense of the relative importance of events and a novelist's skill in directing the reader's attention to the men and the episodes that will influence the course of the whole war, without omitting items which are of momentary interest. His organization of facts could hardly be bettered." --"Atlantic"
Red River to Appomattox
"An unparalleled achievement, an American "Iliad," a unique work uniting the scholarship of the historian and the high readability of the first-class novelist." --Walker Percy
"I have never read a better, more vivid, more understandable account of the savage battling between Grant's and Lee's armies.... Foote stays with the human strife and suffering, and unlike most Southern commentators, he does not take sides. In objectivity, in range, in mastery of detail in beauty of language and feeling for the people involved, this work surpasses anything else on the subject.... It stands alongside the work of the best of them." --"New Republic"

Recreates the Battle of Gettysburg from both the Confederate and Union perspectives.

FREDERICKSBURG TO MERIDIAN

"Gettysburg...is described with such meticulous attention to action, terrain, time, and the characters of the various commanders that I understand, at last, what happened in that battle.... Mr. Foote has an acute sense of the relative importance of events and a novelist's skill in directing the reader's attention to the men and the episodes that will influence the course of the whole war, without omitting items which are of momentary interest. His organization of facts could hardly be better."--Atlantic

"I have never read a better, more vivid, more understandable account of the savage battling between Grant's and Lee's armies.... Foote stays with the human strife and suffering, and unlike most Southern commentators, he does not take sides. In objectivity, in range, in mastery of detail in beauty of language and feeling for the people involved, this work surpasses anything else on the subject.... It stands alongside the work of the best of them."--New Republic

FORT SUMTER TO PERRYVILLE

"Anyone who wants to relive the Civil War, as thousands of Americans apparently do, will go through this volume with pleasure.... Years from now, Foote's monumental narrative most likely will continue to be read and remembered as a classic of its kind."--New York Herald Tribune Book Review

"Here, for a certainty, is one of the great historical narratives of our century, a unique and brilliant achievement, one that must be firmly placed in the ranks of the masters."--Van Allen Bradley, Chicago Daily News

This fictional re-creation of the battle of Shiloh in April 1862 fulfills the standard set by his monumental history, conveying both the bloody choreography of two armies and the movements of the combatants' hearts and minds.

"The letters are a marvel of literary and artistic criticism; they include narrative blueprints, historical insights, and the occasional personal anecdote."—Kenneth Smith, Washington Times

In the late 1940s, Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, friends since their teenage years in Greenville, Mississippi, began a correspondence that would last until Percy's death in 1990. Walker Percy, the highly regarded author of The Moviegoer, wrote six novels, two volumes of philosophical writings, and numerous essays. Shelby Foote met with early success as a novelist, but his reputation today rests more upon his massive three-volume narrative history of the Civil War, and his role as commentator in Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War.

The correspondence between Percy and Foote traces their lives from the beginning of their respective careers, when they were grappling fiercely and openly with their ambitions, artistic doubts, and personal problems. Although they discuss such serious matters as the death of Foote's mother and Percy's battle with cancer, their letters are full of sly humor and good-natured ribbing. Jay Tolson has selected, edited, and annotated the letters of these two remarkable writers to shed light on their relationship and their literary careers.

"This is a wonderful book, essential reading for anyone interested in the lives and work of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy."—Washington Post

THIS 24 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: The Saturday Evening Post Stories, by Shelby Foote. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 141915253X.

THIS 24 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: The Saturday Evening Post Stories, by Shelby Foote. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 141915253X.

Shelby Foote's monumental historical trilogy, "The Civil War: A Narrative," is our window into the day-by-day unfolding of our nation's defining event.  Now Foote reveals the deeper human truth behind the battles and speeches through the fiction he has chosen for this vivid, moving collection.



These ten stories of the Civil War give us the experience of joining a coachload of whores left on a siding during a battle in Virginia  . . .marching into an old man's house to tell him it's about to be burned down . . .or seeing a childhood friend shot down at Chickamauga.



The result is history that lives again in our imagination, as the creative vision of these great writers touches our emotions and makes us witness to the human tragedy of this war, fought so bravely by those in blue and gray.

A mesmerizing novel of faith, passion, and murder by the author of The Civil War: A Narrative. Drawing on themes as old as the Bible, Foote's novel compels us to inhabit lives obsessed with sin and starving for redemption. A work reminiscent of both Faulkner and O'Connor, yet utterly original.

A magnificently orchestrated novel of two Depression-era Mississippi families which is "as modern as today's newpaper, as old as Mosaic law" (The New York Times) and renders the clash between North and South with a violence all the more shocking for its intimacy.

Before Shelby Foote under took his epic history of the Civil War, he wrote this fictional chronicle -- "a landscape in narrative" -- of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations. The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ineffectual fin-de-siecle aristocrat, and a half-wild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War. In prose of almost Biblical gravity; and with a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives -- and sometimes warps them beyond repair -- Foote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of fiction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor but that is resolutely unique.

In September September a magisterial historian of the Civil War charts its distant repercussions in the streets of the contemporary South. By turns wryly comic, ribald, and chilling, Shelby Foote's novel is at once a convincing thriller and a powerful tragicomedy of race.

One of the greatest works of American literature, The Red Badge of Courage gazes fearlessly into the bright hell of war through the eyes of one young soldier, the reluctant Henry Fleming. Written by Stephen Crane at the age of twenty-one, the novel imagines the Civil War's terror and loss with an unblinking vision so modern and revolutionary that, upon publication, critics hailed it as a work of literary genius. Ernest Hemingway declared, "There was no real literature of our Civil War . . . until Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage."

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes the short story "The Veteran," Crane's tale of an aged Civil War soldier looking back at his past.

Cornelius Tacitus brilliantly chronicles the moral decline and rampant civil unrest in the Roman Empire in a period when the earliest foundations of modern Europe were being laid. The Annals commence in a.d. 14, at the death of Augustus, recounting the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula), Claudius, and Nero, and conclude in a.d. 68, the year of Nero’s suicide. The Histories document the tumultuous year a.d. 69, when Emperors Galba, Otho, and Vitellius all perished in quick succession, ushering in Vespasian’s ten-year reign. According to historian Will Durant, “[We must] rank Tacitus among the greatest. . . . The portraits he draws stand out more clearly, stride the stage more livingly than any others in historical literature.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes newly commissioned endnotes.