The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only th… - Shelby Foote

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The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.

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About Shelby Foote

Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. (17 November 1916 – 27 June 2005) was an author and historian of the American Civil War. A native of Greenville, Mississippi, Foote left college early to enlist in the US Army in 1940. [A question here--if he was born in 1916, he wold have been24 in 1940. Did he go to college later than most kids?] After the war he worked as a journalist, and wrote historical fiction, before becoming a historian specialising in the Civil War period. He wrote a 3000 page three volume history, and became well known to the public from his appearance in Ken Burns' documentary series The Civil War (1990).

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Alternative Names: Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. Shelby Dade Foote
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Additional quotes by Shelby Foote

When I was a hardworking, pistol-hot writer, I was unknown. Now that I’m a tired old man, they start hollerin’ how good I am. I’m not going to analyze what that all means. I’m just determined not to let it turn my life into something I don’t want it to be.

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