The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

That two writers--good friends from boyhood--could be so different in outlook and lifestyle gives this correspondence its interest. Even their attitudes toward each other's work can be seen in Walker Percy's preserving most of Foote's letters while his easy-living, thrice-married, allegedly unmoneyed pal began keeping Percy's letters only after 20 years of neglect. The reason becomes obvious. A slow starter but eventually a distinguished novelist whose wry fiction belies his letters, Percy (The Moviegoer) was rigid in thought and rather dull. A Roman Catholic convert and a physician by training, he was often gibed at by Foote, who claimed that the best writing emerges from doubt rather than certainty and that there was ""something terribly cowardly... about the risks to which you won't expose your soul."" Rejecting prayer, Foote confided, ""I do know that the closest to God I ever come is when I'm at my work. Otherwise I don't even feel that I'm part of creation."" Both products of Mississippi, Foote, largely unsuccessful in fiction, produced a now-classic three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative. His feisty opinions on writers and writing are of far more interest than what one learns of their very different lives, the exchange ending with Percy's death in 1990. Now 80, Foote has gone on to popular recognition as commentator in Ken Burns's TV documentary The Civil War. Tolson (Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy) has done an inadequate job of annotating the letters, leaving many titles, names, events and other obscurities unidentified. Photos through the text take the principals and supporting players from their teens into old age. (Nov.)