Free Republic

Shelby Foote's War Story How a Memphis novelist’s history of the Civil War made history itself It was supposed to be a brief assignment—eighteen months or so, tops. In 1954, with the centennial of the end of the Civil War approaching, Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, wrote the novelist Shelby Foote to propose a “short history” of the conflict. In midsummer the author traveled from his home in Memphis to meet with the publisher in New York, and the two came to terms. The target was 200,000 words; the advance, four hundred dollars. For Foote the plan was...

[BACKGROUND]Supreme Court Nominee Samuel Alito touted membership in reactionary organization People For the American Way has requested access to the records of Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) stored at the Library of Congress in the archive of former National Review publisher William Rusher. The records should shed more light on the activities and ideology of the highly controversial organization and could sharpen questions about why Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito touted his membership in the group when applying for a promotion to a high level job in the Reagan Justice Department. The records are held at the Library of Congress...

MEMPHIS, Tennessee (AP) -- Novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote, whose appearances on a PBS-TV documentary series helped America better understand one of the most defining periods of its past, has died, his family said Tuesday. Foote's widow, Gwen, said her husband, who was 88, died Monday night.

A member of the civilian border patrol group Ranch Rescue was arrested in Douglas yesterday on charges stemming from an illegal-imprisonment case in Texas, an FBI spokeswoman said.

“THE ONE GOOD THING TO DO WITH MONEY” Collections of letters can be charming. One of the things I like best about them, and I like this about journals and essay collections also, is that they can be so random. One’s day is not usually an organized treatise in which one thing flows directly from another in some logical patter. I have nothing against logic or organization, but I rather like to live in a world in which I am not quite sure what will happen next. I like it when folks can just “drop by.” The end of my...