Nonfiction | Chapter 16

The Novelist as Historian

Jon Meacham introduces Shelby Foote to a new generation of Americans

By Chris Scott | April 14, 2011

April 14, 2011 Shelby Foote took twenty years to write his magnum opus, The Civil War: A Narrative, gaining worldwide fame for the accomplishment only when Ken Burns featured him in the blockbuster PBS documentary The Civil War. To reintroduce Foote and his three-volume history of war at the beginning of the war’s sesquicentennial, Jon Meacham has edited a collection of essays called American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and His Classic The Civil War: A Narrative. The compilation explains how a good Southern novelist became a great historian and taught Americans to love their country’s past—even when that past wasn’t perfect.

Gardening with George (and John, and Thomas, and James)

In Founding Gardeners, Andrea Wulf gets to the roots of America’s beginning

By Chris Scott | April 14, 2011

April 14, 2011 In Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, writer and gardening historian Andrea Wulf makes a bold claim—that understanding America’s creation requires knowing the founding fathers as gardeners. While historians may debate her thesis, it is certain that Wulf has wonderfully illuminated an often overlooked and very important aspect of the founders’ lives, providing new reasons to be inspired by them. As part of the Salon@615 series, she will discuss and sign Founding Gardeners in the courtyard of the Nashville Public Library at noon on April 20.

American Homer

For Clay Risen, Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War is this nation’s Iliad

By Clay Risen | April 13, 2011

April 13, 2011 Like his putative Greek forerunner, Shelby Foote was not a trained historian but a master storyteller. He wrote four well-received novels before embarking on The Civil War, including Shiloh, a fictional account of the 1862 battle. Long after completing his trilogy of history books, he continued to think of himself first and foremost as a fiction writer: “I think of myself as a novelist who wrote a three-volume history of the Civil War. I don’t think it’s a novel, but I think it’s certainly by a novelist,” he said.

Entirely His Own Man

As a teenager, Hampton Sides wanted to be a rock star, and his band practiced in the same house where Shelby Foote was writing his magnum opus

By Hampton Sides | April 11, 2011

April 11, 2011 Shelby Foote was the first writer I ever met, and the only writer I ever personally knew until I left my hometown of Memphis and went off to college. And so my image of what a writer was supposed to look like, sound like, and smell like, came first and foremost from him. I vaguely sensed even as a high-school teenager that I wanted to be a writer, but watching him, studying him, I couldn’t see how I could get there. I couldn’t see myself wielding a quill pen. My Southern accent was strong enough, but lacked Shelby’s beautiful custardy lilts and Delta diphthongs. And I knew I could never pull off a masterpiece of a beard like his.

Future Flight

Greg Lindsay and John D. Karsada envision a future of instant cities built around airports

By Michael Ray Taylor | April 7, 2011

April 7, 2011 Cities of the future will be built from the airport outward, suggest John D. Karsada, a city planner and business professor, and Greg Lindsay, a journalist, in their new book, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. Greg Lindsay recently answered questions from Chapter 16 via email about the book and its vision of the future. He will discuss and sign copies of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next on April 11 at 6 p.m. at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis.

Compassionate Crusader

Author and environmentalist Scott Russell Sanders talks with Chapter 16

By Paul V. Griffith | April 4, 2011

April 4, 2011 ”A good book appeals to what is best in us,” Scott Russell Sanders has said, and his many fiction and nonfiction titles certainly call to our better angels. In his recent books, A Private History of Awe, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and A Conservationist Manifesto, Sanders examines such issues as environmental responsibility, social justice, the interrelatedness of geography and culture, and spiritual yearning. Next week, he will be in Nashville to headline this year’s Wendell Berry Lecture Series, sponsored by the Nashville Tree Foundation, and in Chattanooga to accept the 2011 Cecil Woods Award for Nonfiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In a recent email exchange with Chapter 16, Professor Sanders discussed, among other things, his vision for a culture based on caretaking rather than consumerism. Sanders will speak at 5 p.m. on April 13 in Montgomery Bell Academy’s Paschall Theater in Nashville, and at 2:30 p.m. on April 15 at the Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga.

Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past

By Tore C. Olsson
St. Martin's Press
288 pages
$30

“I recommend Red Dead’s History unreservedly not only to fans of the iconic video game, but also to anyone who wants to understand the riotousness — from Wild West gunslingers to Jim Crow to lynching — that darkened our past, and which continues to influence our culture. Olsson’s prose is graceful, his analysis profound. This is history at its most accessible and exciting.”

~Peter Cozzens, award-winning author of A Brutal Reckoning