Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative occupies an unusual place in twentieth-century American historical literature. George Garrett, poet and novelist, has referred to it as "the largest and most ambitious single piece of work attempted and completed by any American novelist in this century." Critic Louis D. Rubin has written: "In objectivity, in range, in mastery of detail, in beauty of language and feeling for the people involved, this work surpasses anything on the subject. Written in the tradition of the great historian-artists, ... it stands alongside the works of the best of them."

On the other hand, academic historians have been more restrained in their evaluation and, on the whole, have given as yet rather little attention to the work, perhaps because, as C. Vann Woodward observed in a review of Foote's third volume, "The gradual withering of the narrative impulse in favor of the analytical urge...