The Civil War: A Narrative
A three-volume, roughly 1.2-million-word narrative history of the American Civil War (Fort Sumter to Perryville; Fredericksburg to Meridian; Red River to Appomattox), written over twenty years by Mississippi novelist Shelby Foote and published by Random House between 1958 and 1974. Page count is for the standard complete edition: the Vintage Books 3-volume box set (ISBN 9780394749136), about 2,968 pages total.
Page one sets the terms: "Foote is pretty openly a confederate sympathizer, opening the book by talking about what a good and kind slavemaster Jefferson Davis was." Hold that slant across nearly 3,000 pages of battle after battle and slavery thins out of the very war fought over it: a reader who finished every volume found that "Frederick Douglass and the Ku-Klux-Klan are not mentioned a single time!" Want to check how any of it was sourced? You can't: "The book teems with quotes from multiple sources, yet it omits footnotes." He was a novelist, not a historian, and a detractor names the school he actually wrote in: "the epitome of Lost Cause writing."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
