Status Updates From Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life

Foote has become a successful novelist. Champion provides excellent commentary on Foote's fiction. On the personal level, Foote was married and divorced twice. The problem being he devoted himself to his writing, ignoring his relationships. Foote suffered his first failures following his second divorce, unable to complete his master work "Two Cities." It was never completed. He begins The Civil War A Narrative.

Foote was the product of Delta gentry, and was conscious of his aristocracy by the age of seven. However, Grandfather Foote lost the family fortune as a compulsive gambling card player. Maternal Grandfather was a Jewish merchant, whose department store was lost during the farmers' depression of the early 1920s. Foote grew up rebellious, with an ever present resentment of authority. Unlikely, but he was a Hellion.