SHORT TAKES : Scholar Endures His 15 Minutes

NEW YORK — Historian Shelby Foote, the principal commentator in the PBS series “The Civil War,” recalls when he was simply a secluded scholar who wrote by hand and went days with no company other than his wife and daughter.

Now the phone rings constantly in his Memphis, Tenn., home, Foote told People magazine in its Oct. 15 issue.

Thirty-six years after he published the three-volume “The Civil War: A Narrative,” Foote suddenly is being sought by the media. The books, now in their 18th printing, took him 20 years to write.

“I’m looking forward to when my 15 minutes of Andy Warhol fame are over,” he said. “What I do requires steady work and isolation from all this hoorah.”