“The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.” Shelby Foote, author and historian
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M.C. Tuggle, Writer 
I can certainly identify with that quote! 🙂
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Kaye,
Me, too.
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Excellent and insightful. 🙂
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E. Michael Helms,
Yes, it is. Foote’s multivolume history of the WBTS reads like an adventure novel.
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I own that set of books. A great read they are!
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Great quote.
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Reblogged this on K. DeMers Dowdall and commented:
This quote, by Shelby Foote, is brilliant. Historians, writers, and authors do recreate history by their research or with their love of presenting history by bringing history to life.
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Thank you, Karen!
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Excellent quotation!
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Great quote, Mike. And I agree. 🙂
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I’ve always thought there was a lot of truth in fiction. It’s a matter of what you focus on, and what information you seek to draw out. I like the unofficial version of history, the things that people try to cover up.
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A great quote and so true. And Louis L’Amour would certainly agree.
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