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.

Filled with photographs, drawings, maps, firsthand accounts, and essays, a lavishly illustrated and thorough history of one of the most lethal battles in all of American history provides a gripping narrative that captures the personalities, struggles, and decisions on both sides of the battlefield. Reprint.

Jeffry D. Wert re-creates the last day of the bloody Battle of Gettysburg in astonishing detail, taking readers from Meade's council of war to the seven-hour struggle for Culp's Hill -- the most sustained combat of the entire engagement. Drawing on hundreds of sources, including more than 400 manuscript collections, he offers brief excerpts from the letters and diaries of soldiers. He also introduces heroes on both sides of the conflict -- among them General George Greene, the oldest general on the battlefield, who led the Union troops at Culp's Hill. A gripping narrative written in a fresh and lively style, Gettysburg, Day Three is an unforgettable rendering of an immortal day in our country's history.

A biography that plumbs the ambiguous life of the gentlemanly novelist and historian For a biographer Shelby Foote is a famously reluctant subject. In writing this biography, however, C. Stuart Chapman gained valuable access through interviews and shared correspondence, an advantage Foote rarely has granted to others. Born into Mississippi Delta gentry in 1916, Foote has engaged in a lifelong struggle with the realities behind his persona, the classic image of the southern gentleman. His polished civil graces mask a conflict deep within. Foote's beloved South is a changing region, and even progressive change, of which Foote approves, can be unsettling. In letters and interviews, and in his writings, he often waxes nostalgic as he grapples to recover the grace of an earlier time, particularly the era of the Civil War. Indeed, Chapman reveals that the whole of Foote's novels and historical narratives serves as a refuge from deeply ambiguous feelings. As Foote has struggled to understand the radical shifts brought to his native land by modernization and the region's integration into the nation, his personal history has been clouded by ideological conflict. This biography shows him pining for aristocratic, antebellum culture while rejecting the practices that made possible the injustices of that era. Privately and vehemently, Foote opposed George C. Wallace's and Ross Barnett's untenable segregationist stance. Yet publicly during the 1960s and '70s he skirted the explosive race issue. Foote is best known for his dazzling and definitive The Civil War: A Narrative. Written from 1954 to 1974, the three-volume opus was published during years when the South exploded with racial and political tensions and was forever changed. This biography recognizes that nowhere are Foote's personal conflicts, ambivalence, and outright contradictions more on display than in his fiction. Although Love in a Dry Season, Jordan County, and September, September are set in the contemporary South, they reach no firm social resolutions. Instead they entertain, dramatize, and come to grips with the social, gender, and racial barriers of the southern life he experienced. While showing how Foote's guarded embrace of the South's past and present characterizes his identity as a thinker, a historian, and a writer of fiction, Chapman discloses Foote's reluctance to address burning contemporary issues and his veiled desire to recall more gracious times. C. Stuart Chapman is a Massachusetts State House aide living in Jamaica Plain. His work has been published in the Clarksdale Press-Register, Memphis Business Journal, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Jamaica Plain Gazette, Modern Fiction Studies, and other publications.

Here, from Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Catton, is the dramatic story of the most important battle of the American Civil War: Gettysburg. For three days, from the first shots by Union soldiers to Confederate George Pickett's doomed charge up Cemetery Ridge, Catton brings vividly to life the clash that left some 51,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead or wounded and altered the course of the war.