Shelby Foote, novelist, short story writer, and historian, was born 17 November 1916 in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenville, the son of Shelby Dade and Lillian Rosenstock Foote. His father was a Greenville businessman, his grandfather, Huger Lee Foote, an early planter near Greenville, and his great-grandfather a cavalry officer at Shiloh. Still another ancestor, Isaac Shelby, was governor of Kentucky in its early years and a participant in the Battle of Kings Mountain. Foote was educated through high school in Greenville, where he was influenced by local author William Alexander Percy and was a schoolmate of his nephew, Walker Percy. He and the younger Percy were best friends and in Percy's words, "went into the business of selling poems for 50¢ apiece." About the age of seventeen, Foote became an avid reader.

In 1935, he and Percy decided to attend the University of North Carolina. At Chapel Hill, he...