The correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy / ed. Jay Tolson

Foote, a novelist and Civil War historian (Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, Random, 1994), and Percy, erstwhile physician, latter-day philologist, and philosophical novelist (e.g. The Moviegoer), spent their teens together in Greenville, Mississippi. But if Percy biographer Tolson's edition of their 40-odd-year correspondence is any indication, they did not get around to writing each other regularly until their thirties, with Foote always the sparkplug. Not only do his letters far outnumber Percy's, but they show he fancied himself the latter's cultural mentor to such a tiresome degree that finally the usually pliant Percy breaks out, "Christ, you sound like Ralph Waldo Emerson." Unfortunately, Foote was allowed to play the schoolmarm from hell until Percy died in 1990. Would that the far wittier and more intellectually accomplished Percy had been the chattier one. For as Foote himself recognizes, "Our trouble is you talk about what brings books into being and I talk about this books themselves."