Download or read book Horton Foote written by Wilborn Hampton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-09-08 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No playwright in the history of the American theater has captured the soul of the nation more incisively than Horton Foote. From his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Young Man From Atlanta, to his film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, which received an Oscar, millions of people have been touched by Foote's work. He has long been regarded by other playwrights and screenwriters, actors, and cognoscenti of the theater and cinema as America's master storyteller; critics compared him to William Faulkner and Anton Chekhov. Yet Horton Foote's compelling character and rich life remain largely unknown to the general public. His is the story of an artist who refused to compromise his talents for the sake of fame or money, or just to keep working -- who insisted on writing what he regarded as truth, even when for many years almost no one would listen. In the first comprehensive biography of this remarkable writer, Wilborn Hampton introduces Foote to countless Americans who have admired his work. Hampton, a theater critic for The New York Times, offers a colorful, compulsively readable account of a life and career that spanned seven decades. As a child in the small town of Wharton, Texas, Foote's favorite pastime was to listen to the stories his elders told -- about themselves, their families, their neighbors -- around the dinner table or sitting on the front porch. As he once explained: "One thing I was given in life is a deep desire to listen. I've spent my life listening. These stories have haunted me all my life." The stories also served as an inspiration for Foote's life work as he chronicled America's wistful odyssey through the twentieth century, mostly from the perspective of a small town in Texas. Beginning in the Golden Age of Television with dramas such as The Trip to Bountiful, through Broadway and Off-Broadway successes, to the mark he made in films such as Tender Mercies, and right up through a staging of his complete nine-play opus The Orphans' Home Cycle, he documented the struggle of ordinary people to maintain their dignity in the face of hardship and change that the erosion of time inevitably brings. It is a theme Horton Foote lived. Yet the paradox that shines through his work is that while the externals of life alter over the years -- wealth may be gained or squandered, love may be won or lost, friends and relations die -- people themselves do not. Like Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, Horton Foote's portraits of American life are iconic and true. His stories have helped shape the way Americans see themselves -- indeed, they have become part of the nation's psyche, and they will speak to many generations to come.
Download or read book Horton Foote written by Charles S. Watson and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Young Man from Atlanta and Academy Awards for the screen adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and the original screenplay Tender Mercies, as well as the recipient of an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of The Trip to Bountiful and the William Inge Lifetime Achievement Award, Horton Foote is one of America's most respected writers for stage and screen. The deep compassion he shows for his characters, the moral vision that infuses his social commentary, and the kindness and humanity that Foote himself radiates have also made him one of our most revered artists—the father-figure who understands our longings for home, for human connections, and for certainty in a world largely bereft of these. This literary biography thoroughly investigates how Horton Foote's life and worldview have shaped his works for stage, television, and film. Tracing the whole trajectory of Foote's career from his small-town Texas upbringing to the present day, Charles Watson demonstrates that Foote has created a fully imagined mythical world from the materials supplied by his own and his family's and friends' lives in Wharton, Texas, in the early twentieth century. Devoting attention to each of Foote's major works in turn, he shows how this world took shape in Foote's writing for the New York stage, Golden Age television, Hollywood films, and in his nine-play masterpiece, The Orphan's Home Cycle. Throughout, Watson's focus on Foote as a master playwright and his extensive use of the dramatist's unpublished correspondence make this literary biography required reading for all who admire the work of Horton Foote.
Download or read book Horton Foote s America written by Marian Burkhart and published by Hillcrest Publishing Group. This book was released on 2014 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marian Burkhart offers here an engaging discussion of the work of revered playwright Horton Foote, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and two Academy Awards. Hallie Foote, the playwright's daughter, has written a foreword. A tribute to Foote, Burkhart's book leads the reader into a body of work that continues to win acclaim and grow in popularity for its transcendent and timeless messages. As Burkhart explains, "All of us are the 'ordinary' people who are at home as they live their 'ordinary' lives in the town Foote built out of his inspired understanding of what life means. One has no need to be from East Texas or to go there, for the town exists fully only in the theater, and it houses all of us. That's why this book is called Horton Foote's America."
Download or read book The Death of Papa written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1979-10 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: The play begins by introducing the next generation of Robedauxs in the person of Horace's son, Horace Jr., who comes home from school to find that his maternal grandfather, Henry Vaughn, has died suddenly of a heart attack. From this poi
Download or read book The Young Man from Atlanta written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1995 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: In her review of the play, Marian Burkhart explains the story: In THE YOUNG MAN FROM ATLANTA, a kind of elected ignorance has skewed the past and narrowed the future, for the Kidders, Lily Dale and Will. The two are attempting to cope w
Download or read book Laura Dennis written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1996 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: Laura Dennis lives with Lena Abernathy in Harrison, Texas. Her mother left Harrison years ago, after her father killed his cousin then died when Laura was very young. Writing to her mother, who now lives in far away South Dakota, Laura i
Download or read book The Old Friends written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: Matriarch Mamie Borden and the remaining members of two longtime Texas farming families await a visit from Mamie's son Hugo and his wife, Sybil. When Sybil arrives, alone, with alarming news, old friends on opposing sides must confront the issues surrounding legacy, loyalty, and the meaning of happiness that have hounded them for generations. THE OLD FRIENDS is an absorbing and vital chapter in Foote's beloved and distinctly American body of work.
Download or read book Courtship written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1987 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: As gentle and warm as the spring night in which it takes place, is a mosaic of conversations and encounters that occur during a party at the home of a well-to-do family in Harrison, Texas in 1914. The Vaughns are substantial, God-fearing
Download or read book The Widow Claire written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 1987 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: After returning to Harrison, Texas, from his disastrous visit with his mother and sister (and his new stepfather) in Houston, Horace Robedaux has moved into a local boarding house prior to returning to Houston to take a six week business
Download or read book The Roads to Home written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1982 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORIES: In the first play, A NIGHTINGALE, Mabel and Vonnie, two Houston neighbors and best friends, both refugees from small Texas towns, are forbearing and patient about the protracted and uninvited visits of Annie Long, a girlhood acquaintan
Download or read book The Midnight Caller written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1959 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The play is set in a boarding house in a small town on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Three unmarried women, Alma Jean, Cutie and Miss Rowena, have lived there for years, watching the life of the town. Helen Crews, after a disagreement with her mother, also moves in; Helen had been engaged to Harvey Weems, a charming but weak young man, and the two mothers had managed to break off the engagement. Now Harvey, in love with Helen, but not strong enough to defy his mother, comes every night to Helen's window to call her name. Ralph Johnston, an attractive young man, has just moved to town, and into the boarding house, where he becomes very much interested in Helen. Thanks to Ralph's love, Helen is at last able to leave the town and go off to a happy life of her own and marriage, and Harvey, the midnight caller, is left behind, still calling for her.
Download or read book Farewell written by Horton Foote and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1999-09-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than five decades, Horton Foote, "the Chekhov of the small town," has chronicled with compassion and acuity the changes in American life -- both intimate and universal. His adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and his original screenplay Tender Mercies earned him Academy Awards. He received an Indie Award for Best Writer for The Trip to Bountiful and a Pulitzer Prize for The Young Man from Atlanta. In his plays and films, Foote has returned over and over again to Wharton, Texas, where he was born and where he lives, once again, in the house in which he grew up. Now for the first time, in Farewell, Foote turns to prose to tell his own story and the stories of the real people who have inspired his characters. He was the first child of his generation of Footes, born into an extended family of aunts, great-aunts, grandparents and dozens of cousins once removed, all of whom discovered that even as a young boy Foote was an avid listener with an uncanny ability to extract a story -- including those deemed unfit for children. Foote's memories are of a time when going down to meet the train was an event whether or not you knew someone on it, when black and white children played together until segregation forced them apart at school-age. Foote beautifully maintains the child's-eye view, so that we gradually discover, as did he, that something was wrong with his Brooks uncles, that none of them proved able to keep a job or stay married or quit drinking. We see his growing understanding of all sorts of trouble -- poverty, racism, injustice, marital strife, depression and fear. His memoir is both a celebration of the immense importance of community in our earlier history and evidence that even a strong community cannot save a lost soul. In all of Foote's writing, he reveals the immense drama behind quiet lives, or as Frank Rich has said, "the unbearable turbulence beneath a tranquil surface." Farewell is as deeply moving as the best of Foote's writing for film and theater, and a gorgeous testimony to his own faith in the human spirit.
Download or read book Horton Foote written by Gerald C. Wood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is the first general critical introduction to the writing of Horton Foote, recipient of two Academy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. These original essays survey Foote's career, his work for theater, television, and film, with analysis of Foote's major themes and characteristic style in all three media. The casebook concludes with a list of Foote's produced work, as well as a selective annotated bibliography of primary criticism on the playwright. This book demonstrates the influence of personal biography and Southern literature on Foote's career. The essayists also investigate the writer's contribution to American dramatic realism and independent filmmaking, emphasizing his experimentation with musical structure, dedramatization, and complex subtexts. Foote's disarmingly simple stories, with their radically understated language, are explained in many articles as the product of the subtle influence of the psychological and religious views of the author.
Download or read book The Trip to Bountiful written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 1982 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: This is the poignant story of Mrs. Watts, an aging widow living with her son and daughter-in-law in a three-room flat in Houston, Texas. Fearing that her presence may be an imposition on others, and chafing under the watchful eye of her
Download or read book Lily Dale written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1987 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: After the death of his alcoholic father, and his mother's remarriage, young Horace Robedaux remained in Harrison, Texas, clerking in a dry goods store. When his mother invites him to visit her and his teenage sister, Lily, in Houston, Ho
Download or read book Dividing the Estate written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: Matriarch Stella Gordon is determined not to divide her 100-year-old Texas estate, despite her family's declining wealth and the looming financial crisis. But her three children have another plan. Old resentments and sibling rivalries su
Download or read book Blind Date written by Horton Foote and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1986 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
