The historian Shelby Foote, who died Monday at 88, gained wide renown when he entered millions of American living rooms as the gently authoritative commentator of “The Civil War,” the 1990 PBS documentary by Ken Burns.

The film role was actually a career afterthought for the author of the massive trilogy “The Civil War: A Narrative,” Foote’s uniquely atmospheric literary history of the “War Between the States.” Mostly retired at the age of 73 and with his novels and history out of print, Foote was startled to find himself suddenly famous. “I’m looking forward to when my 15 minutes of Andy Warhol fame are over,” He told People magazine. “What I do requires steady work and isolation from all this hoorah.”

Perhaps he protested too much. A letter he wrote to his lifelong friend, the novelist Walker Percy, reveals: “They call you Gibbon and you know that’s silly. But if they don’t call you Gibbon you get a feeling they’re holding back.”

Foote seems to have been pretty sure of himself from the start. He was raised from the age of 6 by his widowed mother in Greenville, Miss., where he befriended Percy as a teenager. Percy had lost both parents, and was raised by an older cousin, William Alexander Percy, a lawyer, poet, and man of letters. The elder Percy’s home functioned as a sometime literary salon, and Foote made the acquaintance of Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, and William Faulkner, with whom Foote remained in contact for the rest of Faulkner’s life.

When he was 17, Foote later told the writer William Carter, his mother gave him a set of Proust, and after that he seldom paid attention in class again. He followed Walker Percy to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, he was denied admission to a fraternity because he had a Jewish grandfather, and he spent his time reading in the stacks and taking occasional English classes. He withdrew in the late 1930s and returned to Greenville, working odd jobs and writing for Hodding Carter’s Delta Democrat Times. Carter, he recalled, chastised him for spending more time working on his novel than on journalism.

As an enlisted man in the Army, Foote rose to the rank of captain of artillery before being court-martialed in 1944, in circumstances involving a visit to his girlfriend and future wife, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Unable to return home after the shame of his discharge – his ancestors had fought in the Revolution and Civil War – Foote settled in New York, where he briefly reported for the Associated Press before enlisting in the Marines for the balance of World War II.

After receiving an honorable discharge, Foote returned to Greenville and the Democrat Times. In 1946, he sold his first story to the Saturday Evening Post, but his novel was roundly rejected by publishers as too derivative of Joyce and Wolfe. Eventually he rewrote it, and Dial Press published “Tournament” in 1949 to promising reviews. The novel followed the trials of a Delta planter who gambled away his family’s fortune, just as Foote’s own grandfather had done. In his second novel, “Follow Me Down” (1950), Foote experimented with multiple points of view. Perhaps inevitably, he began to be compared to Faulkner. Two more novels followed, the gritty “Love in a Dry Season” (1951) and the painstakingly historically accurate “Shiloh” (1952), which became a best-seller and brought Foote his first real fame. “I’m now ready to write my first big book,” he told the New York Times in 1952.

Inspiration came from an unexpected source. Anticipating the centennial of the Civil War, Random House’s editor, Bennett Cerf, asked the rising Southern novelist to write a single-volume history of the Civil War. Foote, unhappy with the length, offered to write three volumes, anticipating he could finish the trilogy within four years. “The Civil War: A Narrative” took him two decades to write, with volumes published in 1958, 1963, and 1974. Foote compared the project to “swallowing a cannonball.”

Using all his skills as a novelist, Foote portrayed the experience of battle as perhaps nobody since Stephen Crane had done. He made extensive use of contemporary correspondence and memoirs but eschewed footnotes and other scholarly appurtenances – a decision that brought criticism from some professional historians. Most re views, however, were rapturous. Explaining his method with a telling comparison, to the Washington Post in 1983, Foote said: “My job was to put it all in perspective, to give it shape. Look at Flaubert: he didn’t criticize Emma Bovary as a terrible woman; he didn’t judge her, he just put down what happened.”

Foote was idiosyncratic from youth. He insisted on using pen and ink – a dip pen with a double-pronged Esterbrook Probate point – because it slowed him down “so I can get my thoughts right.” His command of Southernisms was unexcelled. He once complained that he had been doing too much socializing and neglecting his work: “I haven’t got in a lick at a snake.” After Ken Burns interviewed him, the young documentarian decided to make Foote the “guiding spirit” of his history because “he provides the painful recollection of the South’s loss without any of the old animosity and the old excuses,” Mr. Burns told People.

Now famous and having sold more books, Foote was sought out for documentaries and interviews on all things Southern. His opinions could be surprising. He abjured equally those who would cleanse government of Confederate flags and symbols, and the “yahoos” who had brought them into racial disrepute. He scoffed at slavery reparations: “That’s almost as absurd as charging them for their passage from Africa here.”

“This country has two profound sins on its soul,” he told the American Enterprise in 2001. “One is slavery … and the other was emancipation. They told four and a half million people, ‘You are free, hit the road.'”

Foote published just one more novel after the historical trilogy: “September” (1978), set against a backdrop of desegregation in Little Rock in 1957. Retitled “Memphis,” it became a made-for-cable movie in 1992, starring Cybill Shepherd.

Ever since the 1950s, when asked what his next project was, Foote would reply that it was an epic novel titled “Two Gates to the City.” He described it as a “Mississippi Karamazov,” but apparently it was just persiflage.

Foote moved from Mississippi to Memphis, Tenn., in the mid-1950s, where he lived in a rambling home. He once told an interviewer he wrote his celebrated trilogy “seven days a week, six hours a day … with a cigarette in my left hand and a pen in my right hand.” He gave up the Chesterfields after an angioplasty and took up walking for exercise, toting a portable tape player. For entertainment, he often turned to the daytime soap opera “As the World Turns.”

Shelby Foote

Born November 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss.; died June 27 in Memphis, Tenn. Survived by his wife, Gwyn, and a son and a daughter; two earlier marriages ended in divorce.