Shelby Foote

Collection contains: Provisional inaugural / Jefferson Davis A young soldier's first battle / Stephen Crane The night before Chancellorsville / F. Scott Fitzgerald Chickamauga / Thomas Wolfe [Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge]( / Ambrose Bierce My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek / William Faulkner Fish-hook Gettysburg / Stephen Vincent Benét The burning / Eudora Welty Pillar of fire / Shelby Foote A private history of a campaign that failed / Mark Twain Homecoming / John O'Hara Second inaugural / Abraham Lincoln.

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. Their letters provide a rich record of an enduring literary and personal friendship. Walker Percy, winner of the National Book Award, wrote six novels, two volumes of philosophical writings, and numerous essays on topics ranging from the aesthetics of bourbon drinking to race and integration in. The South. Described variously as a Catholic novelist and philosophical writer, he was above all a gifted comic moralist, a writer of wit, and a keen observer of manners and mores. Shelby Foote began his career as a novelist, producing in short order five works of fiction that were greeted by favorable reviews and modest sales. Foote's reputation rests far less upon his fiction, however, than upon a massive three-volume narrative history of the Civil War that he started, Almost on a lark, in the early 1950s and completed in 1974. In more recent years, Foote gained an even larger following as a result of his role as a 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 most openly with their ambitions, artistic doubts, and assorted 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, good-natured ribbing, and a large dose of self-mockery.

When he finds a lost beagle in the hills behind his West Virginia home, Marty tries to hide it from his family and the dog's real owner, a mean-spirited man known to shoot deer out of season and to mistreat his dogs.