Shelby Foote – författare

Focused on the pivotal year of 1863, the second volume of Shelby Foote’s masterful narrative history brings to life some of the most dramatic and important moments in the Civil War, including the Battle of Gettysburg and Grant’s Vicksburg campaign.  “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 better.” —The 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.” —The 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 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

Shelby Foote’s magnificently orchestrated novel anticipates much of the subject matter of his monumental Civil War trilogy, rendering the clash between North and South with a violence all the more shocking for its intimacy. 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 of 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.

This debut novel by Shelby Foote, a major Southern writer whose masterpiece is The Civil War: A Narrative, introduces Hugh Bart, a farmer confronting life’s problems in the postbellum South. Hugh’s story is told through a clever blend of rich language and flashbacks that bring to life Jordan County, Foote’s fictional Mississippi Delta community. Many of the remarkable characters introduced here will become staples of Foote’s future works.

Highly praised both here and abroad, Foote’s novels have been on bestseller lists in France and Italy. Whether writing historical narrative or novels, Shelby Foote clearly belongs to the first rank of American writers of our century.

A stark tale of a crime of passion, Follow Me Down tells the story of Luther Eustis, a respectably religious Mississippi farmer who runs off to a deserted island with a young girl and brutally kills her after a three-week idyll. Why did he do it? And what was there about Eustis that attracted the young girl in the first place? The explanation of Eustis’ motives is tangled and far from obvious, and each narrator perceives and reveals only parts and facets of the truth. Bit by bit, the story emerges—with stunning dramatic impact.

Before Shelby Foote undertook his epic history of the Civil War he wrote this fictional chronicle—“a landscape in narrative”—of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations.

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, Foote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of fiction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.

Stories in this collection are: “Rain Down Home,” “Ride Out,” “A Marriage Portion,” “Child by Fever,” “The Freedom Kick,” “Pillar of Fire,” and “The Sacred Mound.”

Réédité tardivement car Shelby Foote le jugeait trop ancré dans son histoire familiale, ce premier roman (1949) retrace l’ascension puis la chute d’un fils de fermier de l’East Mississippi – Hugh Bart, l’intrus aux talents éminents. Il parvient à intégrer la classe des grands planteurs du Delta et à restaurer dans sa splendeur d’antan Solitaire, fief de l’illustre lignée des Jameson qui compte parmi les siens l’un des fondateurs du comté et un héros de la guerre de Sécession.

Il revient à son petit-fils de narrer la geste d’un aïeul victime de son penchant pour le romantique et le chevaleresque – véritable Don Quichotte du Delta et grand chasseur devant l’éternel, qui s’efforça en vain de maintenir les valeurs du Vieux Sud, sapées par l’irruption du progrès et de la modernité, et emportées par le vent de l’Histoire. L’intrigue se déroule pendant la période charnière d’un demi-siècle comprise entre la guerre de Sécession et la Première Guerre mondiale, où l’Amérique perd définitivement son innocence originelle de « Peuple élu de Dieu ».

Salué par Faulkner à sa parution, Bart le magnifique, dans la lignée des Illusions perdues, évoque un destin individuel hors du commun sur fond de fresque historique, en contribuant tout à la fois à déconstruire et à perpétuer les mythes du Sud des États-Unis. À l’instar du grand classique de William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941), le récit éclaire d’un jour cruel cette terre fascinante qui a légué à la nation des Pères fondateurs ses tares les plus funestes, mais aussi donné à la littérature américaine – de William Faulkner à Eudora Welty et de Flannery O’Connor à Thomas Wolfe – quelques-unes de ses voix les plus illustres.

Du pathétique au tragique en passant par l’ironie et l’humour, l’écrivain y exploite avec une jubilation communicative les multiples ressources lexicales et stylistiques de la langue américaine, et livre dans sa préface à la réédition de 1987, qui vient clore tous ses romans publiés, des éléments décisifs pour la lecture de tout l’œuvre à venir.