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Pass Christian, MS 39571
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Mississippi writer Shelby Foote is counted among our finest American writers of the twentieth century. Both his novels and his non-fiction capture the essence of human struggle, whether the internal conflict of a character over morality and making the right choice in the face of temptations to the contrary, or the large scale conflagration and devastation to our young country that we know as The Civil War.

Before Shelby Foote penned his Civil War trilogy, twenty years and a million and a half words in the undertaking, he had written five novels. Years later, he completed a sixth, "September, September."

At the age of five, Shelby Foote lost his father. His mother and aunts raised him in Greenville, Mississippi. At thirteen, he met Walker Percy at the Greenville Country Club. A close, lifelong friendship was formed that endured sixty years until Percy's death in 1990. In a few weeks, Foote will celebrate his eighty-sixth birthday from his home in Memphis.

In addition to the massive scholarship that makes Foote's Civil War trilogy a modern classic, his novelist's flair for describing and setting a scene - always within the boundaries of fact - lift the series far above many of the other Civil War histories. Foote's concise portraits of Davis and Lincoln remain among the most insightful and colorful yet done.

Foote's fiction is cleanly written, linear, self-propelled, and like the planets orbiting around the sun in our solar system, beautiful and fully realized in its naturalness and symmetry. In the literary universe of Foote, the South and what it means to be Southern are the gravitational forces around which all characters revolve.

In "Love In A Dry Season, " bachelor and Yankee Harley Drew arrives in Bristol, Mississippi in search of a fortune, most preferably delivered via marriage into a wealthy family. Drew is patient, calculating, and opportunistic.

Harley Drew's first meeting with Major Barcroft, the father of his intended bride Amanda, observes the tradition of asking the father for his daughter's hand. The exchange between the usurper Drew and Old South Barcroft resonates like the Confederacy's surrender at Appomattox: "There remained only the formality of an interview with the father, the drawing up of the articles of surrender, the scene in which he would offer his hand and pledge his heart . . . ". The premature victor Drew was ready to plunder the spoils, but was cast away because he was unable to answer Major Barcroft's one question, "What color are her eyes?"

Tragedy, despair, and sexual licentiousness lurk at every corner in Bristol, a thinly disguised Greenville. By the pen of a lesser writer, "Love In A Dry Season" would be a potboiler, gothic, tawdry. Foote lifts it to art by descriptive prose, and even more difficult and rare, by insight into the motives of flawed, realistic humans.

Foote is not graphic or uncouth. He is truthful. Here is Amanda Barcroft on reality versus fiction: "It seemed to her that real people just had things happen to them; that was all. They lived along as best they could, never really comprehending . . . whereas in books the characters actually understood - the deeper the experience, the deeper the perception." Through his character Amanda, Foote is telling us why his characters bare all to the reader, while seemingly unable to perceive the results of their actions as they live in their fictional world..

"Jordan County," a connected series of stories, further tells the history and happenings of Bristol. The stories range in time from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Many of the characters and connections introduced in "Love In A Dry Season" appear vicariously through ancestors or offspring. There is an immediacy to Foote's stories that make them appear very modern and current, while the settings remain distant in time.

In a letter to Walker Percy published in "The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy," Foote reveals his motivation: "Writing is the search for answers, and the answer is in the form, the method of telling, the exploration of self, which is our only clew to reality." If the Civil War had not occurred, Foote would have probably invented it for his fiction as a tumultuous stage upon which to move and expose his characters, their motivations, and their tragic pride in being defiantly of the Old South.