Shelby Foote’s “The Civil War: A Narrative”

Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative is an epic three volume work, years in the making, that decades after its first printing remains the definitive narrative history of the Civil War.
Begun in 1958 as a 200,000 word book on the battle of Shiloh, Foote soon discovered that his material was much too expansive [...]