Non-Fiction Books

A matchless account of the Battle of Gettysburg, drawn from Shelby Foote’s landmark history of the Civil War Shelby Foote’s monumental three-part chronicle, The Civil War: A Narrative, was hailed by Walker Percy as “an unparalleled achievement, an American Iliad, a unique work uniting the scholarship of the historian and the high readability of the first-class novelist.” Here is the central chapter of the central volume, and therefore the capstone of the arch, in a single volume. Complete with detailed maps, Stars in Their Courses brilliantly recreates the three-day conflict: It is a masterly treatment of a key great battle and the events that preceded it—not as legend has it but as it really was, before it became distorted by controversy and overblown by remembered glory.

The companion volume to Stars in Their Courses, this marvelous account of Grant's siege of the Mississippi port of Vicksburg continues Foote's narrative of the great battles of the Civil War--culled from his massive three-volume history--recounting a campaign which Lincoln called "one of the most brilliant in the world."

Contains excerpts of the long-running correspondence between comic moralist Walker Percy and novelist and historian Shelby Foote, from the beginnings of their careers in the late 1940s to Percy's death in 1990.