HR0571 94TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

HR0571 LRB094 12887 HSS 47735 r

HOUSE RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, Shelby Foote was born on November 17, 1916, in Greenville, Mississippi, the cultural center of the Mississippi Delta; he was the only child of Shelby Dade Foote, a local businessman, whose roots ran deep in American history, and Lillian Rosenstock Foote; and

WHEREAS, Under the influence of William Alexander Percy, a local author and the uncle of young Shelby's best friend, Walker Percy, young Shelby took to books, discovering abiding favorites from Shakespeare to Dickens; and

WHEREAS, At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Mr. Foote wrote short stories and poems for the campus literary magazine before dropping out in 1937 without taking a degree; he did find occasion, with Walker Percy, to visit William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi; and

WHEREAS, In 1940 Mr. Foote entered the United States Army and served as a battery captain of field artillery in Europe before his Army career ended in 1944; and

WHEREAS, Following his military service, Mr. Foote found odd jobs, including a stint as a reporter for The Delta Democrat Times; and

WHEREAS, In 1946, he sold his first short story to The Saturday Evening Post, and after rejections and rewrites, he sold his first novel, "Tournament", to Dial Press; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Foote would go on to write five more novels, including "Follow Me Down" (1950), "Love in a Dry Season" (1951), "Shiloh" (1952), "Jordan County" (1954), and "September, September" (1978), all of which were set in the South; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Foote's 89 cameo appearances in Ken Burns's PBS series "The Civil War" in 1990 were informed by his own three-volume history of the war, two decades in the making, that blended his practiced novelist's touch with precise, but defiantly un-footnoted research; and

WHEREAS, In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Mr. Foote's "The Civil War: A Narrative" as No. 15 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction; and

WHEREAS, Shelby Foote, a great American Civil War historian, passed away at the age of 88 in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 27, 2005; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Foote is survived by his wife, Gwyn; his daughter, Margaret; and his son, Huger Lee; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE NINETY-FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that the citizens of Illinois celebrate the life and literary gifts of one of the most prominent Civil War novelists of all time; and be it further

RESOLVED, That a suitable copy of this resolution be presented to Mr. Foote's family with our deepest sympathies and highest esteem.