After finishing "September, September", Foote resumed work on "Two Gates to the City", the novel he had set aside in 1954 to write the Civil War trilogy. The work still gave him trouble and he set it aside once more, in the summer of 1978, to write "Echoes of Shiloh," an article for "National Geographic Magazine". By 1981, he had given up on "Two Gates" altogether, though he told interviewers for years afterward that he continued to work on it. He served on the Naval Academy Advisory Board in the 1980s.