The American writer Shelby Foote, who has died aged 88, found that late-arriving celebrity was deeply annoying. As a novelist, he had a regional reputation as a southern writer. His three-volume narrative history of the American civil war, published between 1958 and 1974, was an achievement on a larger scale, and, catching the wave of public interest that accompanied the centennial of the conflict in 1965, Foote enjoyed a brief period of acclaim. But the bitter end of the Vietnam war saw his books drift out of print, and he seemed to have settled into a gentlemanly obscurity.
Then, in 1985, when Foote was approaching the age of 70, he was asked to serve as a consultant on Ken Burns's television history of the civil war for the US Public Broadcasting System (PBS). His 89 appearances in the 11-hour documentary transformed him into a national celebrity. His pungent thoughts about the conflict and its personalities gave the programme a rich vein of anecdote. His mellow, sippin'-whisky Mississippi accent proved irresistible. Audiences of up to 14m, remarkable for the PBS, watched the series.
Foote's books were quickly reprinted, and sold in tens of thousands. He found himself in great demand as a lecturer, while fan letters poured into his home in Memphis, Tennessee. He felt hounded, and did his best to reclaim his privacy.
When asked about the American civil war, Foote resorted to an anecdote. Early in the conflict, he used to say, a squad of Union soldiers closed in on a ragged Johnny Reb. Figuring that he did not own slaves, nor had much interest in the constitutional question of secession, they asked him: "What are you fighting for, anyhow?" The Confederate replied: "I'm fighting because you're down here." Foote regarded that as "a pretty satisfactory answer".
Foote's family had once belonged to the delta aristocracy of southern Mississippi. His ancestors had taken part in the war of independence, and played a prominent part in the early history of the south. His slave-owning great-grandfather, Hezekiah, fought for the Confederacy at the battle of Shiloh in 1862.
It was the sort of classic southern story of family decline and displacement that obsessed William Faulkner. Foote's father was an executive in the Armour meat-packing company, and after his early death in 1922, the family settled in Greenville, Mississippi. Foote attended a good local school, and distinguished himself in high school journalism.
Taken under the wing of a local lawyer, William Alexander Percy, Foote became a lifelong friend of Percy's cousin, Walker Percy, the future novelist. There are 315 letters from Foote to Percy now in the University of North Carolina library (a selection of their correspondence, edited by Jay Tolson, was published in 1998).
It was in the Percy household that Foote first encountered modern literature, becoming a passionate reader of Proust, Faulkner and Joyce. He remarked in the second volume of his history of the civil war that "Proust, I believe, has taught me more about the organisation of material than even Gibbon has done, and Gibbon taught me much."
Foote matriculated at the University of North Carolina in 1935, but thought his courses boring and dropped out after his second year. Returning to Greenville, he wrote for a local newspaper, and began writing a novel, Tournament, about a delta planter who gambled away his fortune. It was a portrait of his grandfather.
Joining the Mississippi national guard, he served as an artillery instructor. Promoted to the rank of captain, he spent several years in Northern Ireland awaiting a wartime combat role which never came. One story has it that Foote defended a soldier against a superior officer, leading to his court martial and dishonourable dismissal from the army. An alternative account, in which Captain Foote went absent without leave to spend time with an Irish girl Tess Lavery (whom he later married), also ends in a dishonourable discharge. He was allowed to enlist in the US marines in 1945, but saw no action.
He published five novels between 1949 and 1953. The most interesting of these was Shiloh (1952), telling the story of the battle through the voices of southern and northern participants. Then came the civil war volumes, published in 1958, 1963 and 1974 respectively. Nearly 3,000 pages long, they were an extraordinary achievement for an untrained, but passionate, novelist historian.
Foote claimed to have read everything, and walked the battlefields, to help his readers feel the experience of the war. He told the stories of men in battle in rich, perhaps over-rich, detail, and in a lush style. Academic historians, preferring an analytic approach to their subject, were sniffy about an amateur whose idea of history was rooted in vivid stories, but Foote reminded his readers that a novelist's eye, and a feel for narrative, could bring history alive.
His first volume begins with Jefferson Davis, soon to be president of the Confederacy, in the US senate in 1861, expressing his "final adieu" to his old colleagues, and to the Union itself. The third volume ends with Davis's death in 1889, and his final comment made to a visiting journalist on his motivation: "Tell the world that I only loved America." Foote played both scenes for their inherent pathos.
There has, perhaps, never been a history, even a popular history, so devoid of ideas, or economic forces. Few historians today share Foote's blindness toward the considerable role of blacks in the war. He scorns northern extremists, blames the abolitionists for provoking the war, and has a fondness for the murderous cavalry exploits of Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose granddaughter he met as a boy, and who permitted him to swing Forrest's sabre above his head. He did not mention that the notoriously racist Confederate general became one of the founding fathers of the Ku Klux Klan.
Foote did not hesitate to affirm that he would have fought for the south; when he used the term "southerner" he meant "white southerner". But he will be remembered with affection because he showed Americans why the civil war mattered, and matters still - and not just to southerners.
He is survived by his third wife, Gwyn Rainer, and two children.
· Shelby Dade Foote Jr, novelist and historian, born November 17 1916; died June 27 2005
