The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy [Hardcover]

Shelby Foote (Author), Walker Percy (Author), Jay Tolson (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1996

In the late 1940s comic moralist Walker Percy and novelist Shelby Foote, friends since their teenage years, began a correspondence which would last until Percy's death in 1990. The letters trace their lives from their early careers, when they were struggling fiercely and openly with their ambitions, artistic doubts and personal problems. They discuss such serious matters as the death of Foote's mother and Percy's battle with cancer, but their letters are also full of humour, good-natured ribbing and self mockery. This edited collection of letters aims to shed light on the relationship of these two remarkable writers as close friends and confidants, and to reveal the path of their literary careers as they gained in stature.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mississippi has produced some of the nation's finest literary voices, includingShelby Foote and Walker Percy. Foote spent much of his career reconstructing the Civil War in a 1.6 million-word trilogy (he was the smooth-drawling storyteller in Kenneth Burns's television series on the conflict). Percy was a philosophical novelist whose work includes The Moviegoer and The Thanatos Syndrome. Not only were the two friends, but they corresponded for years, leaving behind a series of letters unearthed by biographer Jay Tolson. Tolson, the author of an exhaustive book on Percy, Pilgrim in the Ruins, shows that, unlike other Southern writers such as William Faulkner, Foote and Percy always acted as quite decent fellows, Southerners with manners and brains.

From Publishers Weekly

That two writers?good friends from boyhood?could be so different in outlook and lifestyle gives this correspondence its interest. Even their attitudes toward each other's work can be seen in Walker Percy's preserving most of Foote's letters while his easy-living, thrice-married, allegedly unmoneyed pal began keeping Percy's letters only after 20 years of neglect. The reason becomes obvious. A slow starter but eventually a distinguished novelist whose wry fiction belies his letters, Percy (The Moviegoer) was rigid in thought and rather dull. A Roman Catholic convert and a physician by training, he was often gibed at by Foote, who claimed that the best writing emerges from doubt rather than certainty and that there was "something terribly cowardly... about the risks to which you won't expose your soul." Rejecting prayer, Foote confided, "I do know that the closest to God I ever come is when I'm at my work. Otherwise I don't even feel that I'm part of creation." Both products of Mississippi, Foote, largely unsuccessful in fiction, produced a now-classic three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative. His feisty opinions on writers and writing are of far more interest than what one learns of their very different lives, the exchange ending with Percy's death in 1990. Now 80, Foote has gone on to popular recognition as commentator in Ken Burns's TV documentary The Civil War. Tolson (Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy) has done an inadequate job of annotating the letters, leaving many titles, names, events and other obscurities unidentified. Photos through the text take the principals and supporting players from their teens into old age.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 310 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (November 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393040313
• ISBN-13: 978-0393040319
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,313,404 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like eavsedropping on a fabulous conversation, December 13, 1999

By 

Doug Vaughn - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy (Paperback)

I don't know when I have enjoyed a book of letters so much. Usually such things represent only a given writer's letters to a variety of people. This volume is a correspondence between two friends that covers five decades and in it one is able to see them grow, change and take delight in a constant verbal duel that must have been going on from the time they first met as teenagers. For two decades this 'conversation' is mostly a monologue because Foote didn't start saving Percy's letters until the 70's, but it is often easy to imagine Percy's letters from Foote's responses - his answering specific questions and arguing against certain statements.

It is so much fun to see Foote trying for 50 years to get Percy to read Proust, and Percy simply ignoring the injunctions. This is just one of the ongoing literary 'wars' that are fought between these two significant writers who, while being diametrically different in style and theme, were the closest of friends from the age of 14.

I found that once started, I couldn't stop reading. From the first chatty letter from Foote in which he proposes his desire to be a great novelist to the last 'letter' - a message read at Percy's memorial service - the book has the forward momentum of a good novel, the intellectual give and take of a Platonic dialogue and the warmth and humor that only good friends can bring to lifelong disagreements. I think this is a great book and, for all who think that literature is important, a wonderful window into the thinking of two fine minds.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pity poor Shelby Foote, October 2, 2000

By 

Walker E. Rowe III "Walker Elliott Rowe" (Santiago, CHILE) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy (Paperback)

Pity Shelby Foote. Most people know his as a writer of books on the Civil War. But when you read this book of letters you see that what thrilled him most was reading great literature.

The reader of this book of letters between two friends will be thrilled by talk of literature. Foote is like Herr Settembrini of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain". He is so overwhelmed by humantistic learning that he finds he must educate his friend and mentor Hans Castrop, in this case Walker Percy.

It is ironic that the prodigy in this case, Walker Percy, soon eclipses the mentor. Walker Percy agonizes in his early letters about his inability to have his novels published while Foote publishes his books in rapid succession. But today Percy's "Moviegoer" and other books are still read while only Foote's "Shiloh" is really still popular. It seems Foote is stuck with Civil War fame have written his long classic on the war.

Reading Foote's letters is where I discovered Flanney O'Connor. Walker Percy and Shelby Foote spoke highly of her here. They also talk about the important of reading Marcel Proust, Faulkner, and a dozen others. Toward the end Foote begins to spew forth on the merits of reading the Greek classics. It is his description of these books and their authors that adds to one's own literary education.

The first part of the book is a little annoying because Shelby Foote threw away the letters that Walker Percy sent to him for the first many years of their correspondence. So you keep reading Shelby Foote but are not privvy to what Walker Percy as to say.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Witty and informative profile of two good writers, January 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy (Paperback)

Foote and Percy are masters of the English language. This book provides an enjoyable and witty look at a dying lit form, letter writing.( The phone, e-mail and fax are killing it) The two southern writers were friends from boyhood in the thirties to Percy's death in1990. The letters give us two insights to that slice of American history.