Read The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville Online
Authors: Shelby Foote
5. Hood-Davis; Lincoln Reelected.
CHAPTER 5. Y
OU
C
ANNOT
R
EFINE
I
T
1. Petersburg Trenches; Weldon RR
2. March to Sea; Hood, Spring Hill
3. Franklin; Hood Invests Nashville
4. Thomas Attacks; Hood Retreats
5. Savannah Falls; Lincoln Exultant
CHAPTER 6. A T
IGHTENING
N
OOSE
1. Grant; Ft. Fisher; 13th Amendment
2. Confed Shifts; Lee Genl-in-Chief?
3. Blair Received; Hampton Roads
4. Hatcher’s Run; Columbia Burned
CHAPTER 7. V
ICTORY, AND
D
EFEAT
1. Sheridan, Early; Second Inaugural
2. Goldsboro; Sheridan; City Point
3. Five Forks—Richmond Evacuated
4. Lee, Grant Race for Appomattox
CHAPTER 8. L
UCIFER IN
S
TARLIGHT
1. Davis-Johnston; Sumter; Booth
2. Durham; Citronelle; Davis Taken
3. K. Smith; Naval; Fort Monroe
4. Postlude: Reconstruction, Davis
The Civil War: A Narrative
Volume II,
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 bettered.”—
Atlantic
“Though the events of this middle year of the Civil War have been recounted hundreds of times, they have rarely been re-created with such vigor and such picturesque detail as in Mr. Foote’s ‘Civil War: A Narrative.’ ”—
New York Times Book Review
“The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting are all controlled by a constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist’s feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian’s scrupulous regard for recorded fact.
The Civil War
is likely to stand unequaled.”—WALTER MILLS
The Civil War: A Narrative
Volume III,
Red River to Appomattox
“Foote is a novelist who temporarily abandoned fiction to apply the novelist’s shaping hand to history: his model is not Thucydides but
The Iliad
and his story, innocent of notes and formal bibliography, has a literary design. Not by accident … but for cathartic effect is so much space given to the war’s unwinding, its final shudders and convulsions.… To read this chronicle is an awesome and moving experience. History and literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here; one finishes this volume convinced that no one need undertake this particular enterprise again.”—
Newsweek
“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. Written in the tradition of the great historian-artists—Gibbon, Prescott, Napier, Freeman—it stands alongside the work of the best of them.”—
New Republic
“The most written-about war in history has, with this completion of Shelby Foote’s trilogy, been given the epic treatment it deserves.”—
Providence Journal
SHELBY FOOTE was born in Greenville, Mississippi, and attended school there until he entered the University of North Carolina. During World War II he served in the European theater as a captain of field artillery. He has written five novels:
Tournament, Follow Me Down, Love in a Dry Season, Shiloh
and
Jordan County
. He has been awarded three Guggenheim fellowships. He died in 2005.
All For the Union
by Elisha Hunt Rhodes
Trade/978-0-679-73828-2
eBook/978-0-307-77270-1
The American Civil War
by John Keegan
Trade/978-0-307-27493-9
eBook/978-0-307-27314-7
Ashes of Glory
by Ernest B. Furgurson
Trade/978-0-679-74660-7
Buffalo Bill’s America
by Louis S. Warren
Trade/978-0-375-72658-3
eBook/978-0-307-42510-2
The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War
by Leonard L. Richards
Trade/978-0-307-27757-2
eBook/978-0-307-26737-5
Chancellorsville 1863
by Ernest B. Furgurson
Trade/978-0-679-72831-3
The Civil War Dictionary
by Mark Boatner
Trade/978-0-679-73392-8
The Civil War in the American West
by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.
Trade/978-0-679-74003-2
Civil War Wives
by Carol Berkin
Trade/978-1-4000-9578-0
eBook/978-0-307-27293-5
The Civil War
by Geoffrey C. Ward
Trade/978-0-679-75543-2
eBook/978-0-307-55515-1
Confederates in the Attic
by Tony Horwitz
Trade/978-0-679-75833-4
eBook/978-0-307-76301-3
Days of Defiance
by Maury Klein
Trade/978-0-679-76882-1
The Destructive War
by Charles Royster
Trade/978-0-679-73878-7
Did Lincoln Own Slaves?
by Gerald J. Prokopowicz
Trade/978-0-307-27929-3
eBook/978-0-307-37714-2
The Era of Reconstruction 1864–1877
by Kenneth M. Stampp
Trade/978-0-394-70388-6
Forever Free
by Eric Foner
Trade/978-0-375-70274-7
Freedom Rising
by Ernest B. Furgurson
Trade/978-0-375-70409-3
eBook/978-0-307-42595-9
Honor’s Voice
by Douglas L. Wilson
Trade/978-0-375-70396-6
Jefferson Davis, American
by William J. Cooper
Trade/978-0-375-72542-5
eBook/978-0-307-77264-0
Lincoln
by Richard Carwardine
Trade/978-1-4000-9602-2
eBook/978-0-307-26467-1
Lincoln Reconsidered
by David Herbert Donald
Trade/978-0-375-72532-6
Lincoln’s Sword
by Douglas L. Wilson
Trade/978-1-4000-3263-1
Lincoln’s Virtues
by William Lee Miller
Trade/978-0-375-70173-3
Nathan Bedford Forrest
by Jack Hurst
Trade/978-0-679-74830-4
eBook/978-0-307-78914-3
The Negro’s Civil War
by James M. McPherson
Trade/978-1-4000-3390-4
eBook/978-0-307-48860-2
Not War But Murder
by Ernest B. Furgurson
Trade/978-0-679-78139-4
eBook/978-0-307-42704-5
Nothing But Victory
by Steven E. Woodworth
Trade/978-0-375-72660-6
eBook/978-0-307-42706-9
President Lincoln
by William Lee Miller
Trade/978-1-4000-3416-1
eBook/978-0-307-26871-6
The Reel Civil War
by Bruce Chadwick
Trade/978-0-375-70832-9
eBook/978-0-307-49008-7
Roll, Jordan, Roll
by Eugene D. Genovese
Trade/978-0-394-71652-7
eBook/978-0-307-77272-5
Sherman’s March
by Burke Davis
Trade/978-0-394-75763-6
The State of Jones
by Sally Jenkins
Trade/978-0-7679-2946-2
eBook/978-0-385-53032-3
They Fought Like Demons
by De Anne Blanton
Trade/978-1-4000-3315-7
This Republic of Suffering
by Drew Gilpin Faust
Trade/978-0-375-70383-6
eBook/978-0-307-26858-7
Twilight at Little Round Top
by Glenn W. LaFantasie
Trade/978-0-307-38663-2
What Lincoln Believed
by Michael Lind
Trade/978-1-4000-3073-6
eBook/978-0-307-43016-8
What They Fought For 1861–1865
by James M. McPherson
Trade/978-0-385-47634-8
What This Cruel War Was Over
by Chandra Manning
Trade/978-0-307-27732-9
eBook/978-0-307-26743-6
Wolf of the Deep
by Stephen Fox
Trade/978-1-4000-9542-1
eBook/978-0-307-49882-3
VINTAGE CIVIL WAR LIBRARY
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
FOLLOW ME DOWN
In Jordan County, Mississippi, a murder trial is drawing to a close. The victim is a young woman who has been found strangled and weighed down with concrete blocks at the bottom of a lake. The defendant is a God-haunted farmer old enough to be her father. The trial is a formality, because Luther Eustis has already confessed. But as Shelby Foote re-creates the murder of Beulah Ross—and the annihilating passion that drew her to her murderer—he generates a suspense full of tension and foreboding. Drawing on themes as old as the Bible and investing them with the chilling dignity of a mountain folk song,
Follow Me Down
immerses us in lives obsessed with sin and redemption, desire and vengeful retribution. It transports us to a territory of the imagination that is touching, sometimes terrible, but always deeply recognizable: a place that only the best fiction ever penetrates.
Fiction/978-0-307-77928-1
JORDAN COUNTY
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-siècle 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.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-77927-4
LOVE IN A DRY SEASON
Love in a Dry Season
describes an erotic and economic triangle, in which two wealthy and fantastically unhappy Mississippi families— the Barcrofts and the Carrutherses—are joined by an open-faced fortune hunter from the North, a man whose ruthlessness is matched only by his inability to understand the people he tries to exploit and his fatal incomprehension of the passions he so casually ignites. Combining a flawless sense of place with a Faulknerian command fo the grotesque, Foote’s novel turns a small cotton town into a sexual battleground as fatal as Vicksburg or Shiloh—and one where strategy is no match for instinct and tradition.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-77925-0
SHILOH
Shelby Foote’s monumental three-part chronicle of the Civil War was hailed by Walker Percy as “an American
Iliad
, a unique work uniting the scholarship of the historian and the high-readability of the first-class novelist.”
Shiloh
warrants similar praise, for while it is a powerful novel—a spare, unrelenting account of two days of battle in April 1862—it is also a stunning work of imaginative history, conveying not only the bloody choreography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but the inner movements of the combatants’ hearts and minds. Through the eyes of officers and illiterate foot soldiers, heroes and cowards,
Shiloh
creates a dramatic mosaic of a critical moment in the making of America, complete to the haze of gunsmoke and the stunned expression in the eyes of dying men.
Fiction/978-0-307-77926-7
VINTAGE CIVIL WAR LIBRARY
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com