Tournament is the successful first novel by Shelby Foote, a major Southern writer whose masterpiece, The Civil War: A Narrative, has become the modern standard against which all other works of historical narrative must be weighed. In Tournament, many of the remarkable characters from Jordon County, Foote's fictional Mississippi Delta country, come upon the literary scene for the first time. Louis Rubin, in his introductory essay on Tournament, finds major Proustian resonances and predicts lines along which Foote's future novels will develop. Highly praised both here and abroad, Foote's novels have been on the bestseller lists in France and Italy. Whether writing historical narrative or novels, he clearly belongs to the first rank of American writers of our era. "... Lavish in its expenditure of literary capital that could have made up the contents of three or four novels...." "... An original act of the literary imagination." —from the foreword by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. "Foote, like Faulkner, sees the Deep South with an unblinking eye." —L'Express
Tournament is the successful first novel by Shelby Foote, a major Southern writer whose masterpiece, The Civil War: A Narrative, has become the modern standard against which all other works of historical narrative must be weighed. In Tournament, many of the remarkable characters from Jordon County, Foote's fictional Mississippi Delta country, come upon the literary scene for the first time. Louis Rubin, in his introductory essay on Tournament, finds major Proustian resonances and predicts lines along which Foote's future novels will develop. Highly praised both here and abroad, Foote's novels have been on the bestseller lists in France and Italy. Whether writing historical narrative or novels, he clearly belongs to the first rank of American writers of our era. "... Lavish in its expenditure of literary capital that could have made up the contents of three or four novels...." "... An original act of the literary imagination." —from the foreword by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. "Foote, like Faulkner, sees the Deep South with an unblinking eye." —L'Express