"Live" with TAE.(Interview)

TAKE A SPIRITED RAMBLE WITH AMERICA'S MOST LITERARY HISTORIAN AS HE DISCUSSES RACISM, CIVIL WAR BATTLES, LINCOLN, COMPUTERS, THE CONFEDERATE FLAG, NOVEL WRITING, TELEVISION, REDNECKS, THE KLAN, BIG GOVERNMENT, AND YELLOW-DOG DEMOCRATS.

Shelby Foote

Shelby Foote, a native of Greenville, Mississippi, was the author of five much-admired novels when his career took one of the richest detours in literary history: He spent 20 years writing a three-volume history of the Civil War that many regard as one of the great achievements in modern letters. More than a dozen years after the last volume was published, Foote became certifiably famous when his Delta drawl and handsome presence dominated Ken Burns' PBS series, "The Civil War." Foote, now 83, remains a Mississippi original: Images of Marcel Proust and bluesman Robert Johnson adorn his study, where he still writes with a pen dipped in ink. Associate editor Bill Kauffman interviewed Foote at his home in Memphis.

TAE: The holy warriors against tobacco haven't convinced you to give up your pipe, I take it?

FOOTE: It took me 20 years to write The Civil War, and I wrote it seven days a week, six hours a day. I wrote it with a cigarette in my left hand and a pen in my right hand. At a conservative estimate of a pack and a half a day of regular Chesterfields, I figure I smoked 150,000 Chesterfields in the course of writing The Civil War, and I'm here to tell the story.

They did convince me to give up cigarettes when I had angioplasty, but I've been smoking my pipe three times as often as before.

TAE: Do anti-smoking zealots remind you of the mid-nineteenth-century fanatics, whether fire-eaters in the South or abolitionists in the North?