"I think of myself as a novelist who wrote a three-volume history of the Civil War," writer Shelby Foote told an interviewer for Paris Review. "I don't think it's a novel, but I certainly think it's by a novelist. The novels are not novels written by a historian." This elemental fact defines Foote as a writer: starting out as a novelist who plumbed the depths of the South in books such as Tournament, Follow Me Down, Love in a Dry Season, and Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative, he dissected a particular mythical region much as did his fellow Mississippian, William Faulkner, in his tales set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Recounting much of the history of Mississippi's Delta region in these novels, Foote assembled a cast of characters, from hardscrabble farmers to well-to-do planter families, in order to profile the region where he had grown up and...