The first volume covers the roots of the war to the Battle of Perryville on October 8, 1862. ( November 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources.

Writing the third volume took as many years as had the first two combined. In 1964 he began Volume 3, Red River to Appomattox, but found himself repeatedly distracted by the ongoing events in the nation and was not able to finish and publish it until 1974. By 1963 Foote had finished the second volume, Fredericksburg to Meridian. This 400,000-word account was published in 1958. Random House agreed, and using the money from his 1955 Guggenheim Fellowship (Foote won Guggenheims also in 19.) Foote set out to write the trilogy's first volume, Fort Sumter to Perryville. Foote soon realized that the project would require much more time and energy, and therefore offered to write a comprehensive narrative history of the war. On the strength of his novel Shiloh, Random House asked Foote for a short Civil War history. The individual volumes include Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963), and Red River to Appomattox (1974). While it touches on political and social themes, the main thrust of the work is military history. Although previously known as a novelist, Foote is most famous for this non-fictional narrative history.

The Civil War: A Narrative (1958–1974) is a three volume, 2,968-page, 1.2 million-word history of the American Civil War by Shelby Foote.

The civil war by shelby foote