Shelby Foote

Shelby Foote thought of himself first as a novelist, but it was The Civil War: A Narrative, his three-volume history of the war, that made his name, and a 1990 appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War introduced his Mississippi Delta cadence to a national audience who had never heard of him. He wrote every word of it by hand with a nib pen before typing up a clean copy, even as professional historians later pushed back on aspects of his interpretation.