Foote, Horton 1916–

PERSONAL: Born Albert Horton Foote, Jr., March 14, 1916, in Wharton, TX; son of Albert (a merchant and cotton farmer) and Hallie (Brooks) Foote; married Lillian Vallish, June 4, 1945; children: Barbarie Hallie, Al-bert Horton, Walter Vallish, Daisy Brooks. Education: Studied at Pasadena Playhouse School of Theatre, 1933–35, and Tamara Darkarhovna School of Theatre, 1937–39.

ADDRESSES: Home—505 North Houston St., Wharton, TX 77488. Office—c/o Luckyroll, 390 West End Ave., New York, NY 10024.

CAREER: Writer for stage, screen, and television. Actor in Broadway plays, 1932–42, including The Eternal Road, The Fifth Column, The Coggerers, and Texas Town; manager and instructor in playwriting and acting for Productions, Inc. (a semi-professional theatre), Washington, DC, 1945–49. Writer of dramatic teleplays for Columbia Broadcasting Company (CBS), National Broadcasting Company (NBC), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC); contributor of scripts to dramatic television series, including Kraft Playhouse, DuPont Show of the Week, and Playhouse 90.

MEMBER: Writers Guild of America, Authors Guild, Dramatists Guild, Texas Institute of Letters, Fellowship of Southern Writers.

AWARDS, HONORS: Academy Award for best screenplay, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Writers Guild of America Screen Award, both 1962, both for To Kill a Mockingbird; Academy Award for best screenplay, 1983, and Christopher Award, both for Tender Mercies; Academy Award nomination for best screenplay, 1985, and Writers Guild Award nomination, both for The Trip to Bountiful; Capostelo Award, 1987; elected to Fellowship of Southern Writers, 1988; Evelyn Burkey Award, Writers Guild, 1989; William Inge Lifetime Achievement Award, 1989; Dickinson College Arts Award, 1989; Alley Theatre Award, Houston, TX, 1991; Headliners' Club Award, 1991; Torch of Hope Award, Barbara Barondess Theatre Lab Alliance, 1992; Laurel Award, Writers Guild of America, West, 1993; Lontinkle Award, Texas Institute of Letters, 1994; Lifetime Achievement Award, Heartland Film Festival, 1995; Outer Critics Circle Special Achievement Award, 1995; Academy Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Lucille Lortel Award, and Pulitzer Prize for drama, all 1995, all for The Young Man from Atlanta; inducted into Theatre Hall of Fame, 1996; Emmy Award, 1997, for teleplay, Old Man; American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Drama, 1998, for lifetime achievement; elected to American Academy of Arts and Letters Department of Literature, 1998; RCA Crystal Heart, Career Achievement Award, Heartland Film Festival, 1998; Ian McKellan Hunter Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement, Writer's Guild of America, East, 1999; Annual Bookend Award, Texas Book Festival, 1999; Pen/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama to a master American dramatist, 2000; Last Frontier Playwright Award, Edward Albee Theatre Conference, 2000; New York State Governor's Arts Award, New York State Council on the Arts, 2000; National Medal of Arts, 2000; Texas Medal of Arts Award in Literary Arts, Texas Cultural Trust Council, 2001; honorary degrees received from Drew University, Austin College, and American Film Institute, Spalding University, University of the South, and University of Hartford.

WRITINGS:

PLAYS

Only the Heart (three-act; produced in New York, NY at Bijou Theatre, 1944; broadcast by NBC, 1947), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1944.

The Chase (also see below; three-act; produced on Broadway, 1952), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1952.

The Trip to Bountiful (also see below; three-act; broadcast by NBC, 1953; produced on Broadway, 1953), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1954.

A Young Lady of Property (also see below; contains The Dancers [broadcast by NBC, 1954, produced in Los Angeles at Fiesta Hall, 1963], A Young Lady of Property, The Old Beginning, John Turner Davis [broadcast by NBC, 1953, produced in New York, NY, 1958], Death of the Old Man, and The Oil Well), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1954.

The Traveling Lady (also see below; three-act; produced on Broadway, 1954; broadcast by CBS, 1957), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1955.

The Midnight Caller (one-act; broadcast by NBC, 1953; produced in New York, NY, 1958), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1959.

Harrison, Texas: Eight Television Plays, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1959.

Three Plays (also see below; contains Roots in a Parched Ground and two plays based on stories by Faulkner, Old Man and Tomorrow), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962.

Tomorrow (also see below; based on a story by William Faulkner, broadcast by CBS, 1960; produced Off-Broadway, 1985), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1963, revised edition, 1996.

The Roads to Home (broadcast by ABC, 1955; produced in New York, NY at Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, 1982), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1982.

Blind Date (one-act; part of "Marathon '86;" produced in New York, NY at Ensemble Studio Theatre, 1986), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1986.

Selected One-Act Plays of Horton Foote, edited by Gerald C. Wood, SMU Press (Dallas, TX), 1988.

Habitation of Dragons (produced at Pittsburgh Playhouse, 1988), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1993.

The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1989.

Horton Foote: Four New Plays, Smith & Kraus, 1993.

The Tears of My Sister, The Prisoner's Song, The One-Armed Man, The Land of the Astronauts, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1993.

The Young Man from Atlanta, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1995.

Laura Dennis, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1996.

Taking Pictures, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1996.

Night Seasons, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1996.

Getting Frankie Married—and Afterwards and Other Plays, Smith & Kraus, 1999.

The Last of the Thorntons (produced in New York, NY by Signature Theater, 2000), Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY), 2000.

The Carpetbagger's Children; The Actor, Two Plays Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY), 2003,

UNPUBLISHED PLAYS

Texas Town, produced in New York, NY at Weidman Studio, 1941, produced Off-Broadway, 1942.

Out of My House, produced in New York, NY, 1942.

Celebration (one-act), produced in New York, NY at Maxine Elliott Theatre, 1948.

(Author of book) Gone with the Wind (musical version of Margaret Mitchell's novel), produced in London's West End, 1972, produced in Los Angeles at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 1973.

The Road to the Graveyard (one-act; part of "Marathon '85"), produced in New York, NY at Ensemble Studio Theatre, 1985.

Dividing the Estate, produced in Princeton, NJ, at McArthur Theatre, 1989.

Talking Pictures, produced in Sarasota, FL, at Asolo Theater, 1990.

Vernon Early, produced in Montgomery, AL at Carolyn Blount Theater, 1998.

The Prisoner's Song, produced in New York, NY, 2002.

Also author of plays produced Off-Broadway, including The Night Seasons, In a Coffyn in Egypt, The Old Friends, and Arrival and Departure. Author of play Wharton Dance, produced by American Actors Company.

"ORPHANS' HOME" CYCLE

Roots in a Parched Ground (also see below; broadcast by CBS under title The Night of the Storm, 1960), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1962.

Convicts, produced in New York, NY at Ensemble Studio Theatre, 1983.

Courtship (also see below; produced in Louisville, KY, by Actors' Theatre, 1984), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1984.

Lily Dale (also see below), produced Off-Broadway, 1986.

The Widow Claire (also see below), produced Off-Broadway, 1986.

"Courtship," "Valentine's Day," and "1918": Three Plays from "The Orphans' Home" Cycle (broadcast by PBS as The Story of a Marriage, 1987), Grove Press (New York, NY), 1987.

On Valentine's Day (also see below; produced Off-Broadway, 1980), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1987.

1918 (also see below; produced Off-Broadway, 1982), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1987.

"Roots in a Parched Ground," "Convicts," "Lily Dale," and "The Widow Claire" (also see below), Grove Press (New York, NY), 1988.

The Death of Papa (also see below), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1989.

"Cousins" and "The Death of Papa": Two Plays from "The Orphans' Home" Cycle (also see below), Grove Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Cousins (produced in Los Angeles at The Loft, 1984), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1990.

SCREENPLAYS

Storm Fear (based on novel by Clinton Seeley), United Artists, 1956.

To Kill a Mockingbird (based on the novel by Harper Lee), Universal, 1962, published as The Screenplay of "To Kill a Mockingbird," Harcourt (New York, NY), 1964.

Baby, the Rain Must Fall (based on Foote's play, The Traveling Lady), Columbia, 1965.

(With Thomas Ryan) Hurry Sundown (based on the novel by K.B. Glidden), Paramount, 1966.

Tomorrow (based on the story by William Faulkner), Filmgroup, 1971.

Tender Mercies, Universal, 1983.

1918, Cinecom International, 1984.

On Valentine's Day, Angelika Films, 1985.

The Trip to Bountiful, Island Pictures, 1985.

"To Kill a Mockingbird," "Tender Mercies," and "The Trip to Bountiful": Three Screenplays, Grove Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Convicts, M.C.E.G., 1991.

Of Mice and Men (adapted from the novel by John Steinbeck), 1991.

Lily Dale, Showtime, 1996.

Also author of screenplay, Spring Moon (based on the novel by Bette Bao Lord), 1987.

TELEVISION PLAYS

Ludie Brooks, CBS, 1951.

The Travelers, NBC, 1952.

The Old Beginning, NBC, 1953.

The Trip to Bountiful, 1953.

The Oil Well, NBC, 1953.

The Rocking Chair, NBC, 1953.

Expectant Relations, NBC, 1953.

John Turner Davis, 1953.

The Midnight Caller, 1953.

Tears of My Sister, NBC, 1953.

Young Lady of Property, NBC, 1953.

Death of the Old Man, NBC, 1953.

Shadow of Willie Greer, NBC, 1954.

The Dancers, 1954.

The Roads to Home, 1955.

Flight, NBC, 1956.

Drugstore: Sunday Noon, ABC, 1956.

Member of the Family, CBS, 1957.

Old Man (based on the novel by William Faulkner), CBS, 1959, revised version, Hallmark Hall of Fame, 1997.

The Shape of the River, CBS, 1960.

The Night of the Storm, 1960.

The Gambling Heart, NBC, 1964.

The Displaced Person (based on a story by Flannery O'Connor), PBS, 1977.

Barn Burning (based on a story by William Faulkner), PBS, 1980.

Keeping On, PBS, 1983.

Habitation of Dragons, 1991.

Lily Dale, 1996.

Alone, 1997.

Horton Foote's The Shape of the River: The Lost Tele-play about Mark Twain, with History and Analysis, by Mark Dawidziak, Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2003.

OTHER

The Chase (novel), based on Foote's play, Rinehart (New York, NY), 1956.

Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood, Scribner (New York, NY), 1999.

Beginnings: A Memoir, Scribner (New York, NY), 2001.

Genesis of an American Playwright, edited and with an introduction by Marion Castleberry, Baylor University Press, 2004.

ADAPTATIONS: The Chase was adapted to film by Lillian Hellman for Columbia Pictures, 1965.

SIDELIGHTS: Horton Foote is a prolific writer for stage and screen whose dramas of rural Texas reveal the fundamentals and universals of the human condition. Awarded a National Medal of Arts by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2000, Foote is perhaps best known for his films, including To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies. It is on the stage, however, where the author's artistry most manifests itself. "Much of Foote's drama treats the common man and woman realistically in disturbing but strangely comforting stories," observed an essayist for Contemporary Dramatists. "The pathos that ordinary people undergo, the nobility of the neglected and the forgotten, the profound humor in unsuspected houses and families, the suffering around every corner, the substantiality of what is taken for granted, the high stakes wagered in backstairs games—these constitute his subject." In a career spanning more than sixty years of writing about small-town life, Foote has become affectionately known for works that pierce to the core of human relationships from the cradle to the nursing home.

"From the beginning," Foote once wrote, "most of my plays have taken place in the imaginary town of Harrison, Texas, and it seems to me a more unlikely subject could not be found in these days of Broadway and world theatre, than this attempt of mine to recreate a small Southern town and its people. But I did not choose this task, this place, or these people to write about so much as they chose me, and I try to write of them with honesty." At a time when the sensational and carnal preside over a great portion of the popular dramatic arts, Foote continues to stress the subtle and the intimate with lean dialogue and understated action. "What seems remarkable about Foote's career," wrote Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times,"is that across all the media and amid all the conflicts of art versus commerce, in which art is always the long-odds underdog, he has produced a coherent body of work…. It is most often an intimate, loving, perceptive exploration of ordinary people and their often extraordinary resilience, courage, persistence and wisdom in the face of trials, disappointments and dreams that have had to be deferred or abandoned."

Foote was born in Wharton, Texas, and was raised in a well-to-do family. He showed precocious reading habits from early youth, enrolling in the Book-of-the-Month club when he was twelve. After high school he left Texas to enroll in the Pasadena Playhouse School of Theatre, and at the height of the Great Depression he arrived in New York, NY in search of an acting job. He was cast in several Off-Broadway plays during the late 1930s, and it was while performing with the American Actors Company between 1939 and 1942 that Foote realized his talent as a dramatist. In 1942 his play Texas Town was produced in New York City. For the next three years Foote operated a production company in Washington, DC, and managed to get two more works produced in New York, 1942's Out of My House and 1944's Only the Heart. "It is impossible not to believe absolutely in the reality of his characters," wrote Brooks Atkinson in his review of Texas Town for the New York Times. Of Out of My House, Atkinson commented: "Foote pulls himself together in a vibrant and glowing last act that is compact and bitterly realistic."

Foote's early plays—emotionally restrained dramas emphasizing character development and set within the social context of the rural South—established a recognizable pattern from which he has rarely wavered. The Contemporary Dramatists contributor wrote: "The rhetoric of Foote's work suggests that the language we regularly use be taken as fully adequate to our condition and that our condition consists precisely of the people we know, the work we do, and the era in which we live…. Nothing and no one is unrelated, even by choice." As James M. Wall put it in the Christian Century, Foote's "writing is deceptively simple, filled with quiet exchanges between people who desperately want to understand what is happening to them but are constantly confronted by loss and suffering over which they have no final control." A contributor to Contemporary Southern Writers similarly noted: "In [Foote's] plays and screenplays life, even common, middle-class life, is full of quiet terror and mystery…. But in Foote's world things never are quite hopelessness, for balancing out the world's unpleasant surprises is always the possibility of love, a kind of countervailing, benevolent mystery."

In the late 1940s, while still writing for the stage, Foote also began working in television. He adapted many of his own dramas for such showcases as Playhouse 90 and Kraft Playhouse, and occasionally adapted the work of other Southern writers to television, including William Faulkner's Old Man and Tomorrow. In all, Foote adapted more than thirty dramas for television. His book Harrison, Texas, a collection of eight television plays written and produced between January, 1953, and March, 1954, elicited reviewer praise. "Television is in redemptive hands as long as it can work with art like this," wrote a Saturday Review critic.

In Foote's acclaimed 1953 teleplay, The Trip to Bountiful, an elderly widow longs to escape the cramped Houston, Texas apartment she shares with her unsupportive son and his lazy wife. The widow eventually journeys to her small-town birthplace, only to find desolation instead of a sentimental homecoming. Prompted by Bountiful's television success, Foote adapted it for the theater, and it ran on Broadway that same year. Later, a film version earned Foote an Oscar nomination for best screenplay.

In 1956, Foote's play The Chase was published as a novel and received critical acclaim for its dramatic power and strong characterizations. Anthony Boucher made these comments: "Sharply effective as a melodrama of violence, it is also powerful as a novel of character, probing deeply into many lives … and studying the inherent moral and psychological problems of violence." While Commonweal's W.J. Smith found the book's lengthy epilogue to be ineffective, he was enthusiastic about the story itself: "The characterizations are excellent, the action is fast and suspenseful and the ramifications of the plot neatly interlocked. The novel attains a level beyond that of the mere thriller—psychological melodrama, perhaps, describes it better."

With the demise of live television in the late 1950s, Foote moved his dramatic efforts to the movie screen. His adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1962 Academy Award for best screenplay, and Gregory Peck received the award for best ac-tor for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the father. Concentrating on the lives of two children in depression-era, rural Alabama, the film reveals the prevailing bigotry of a small town as the children watch their father defend in court a black man falsely accused of rape. The film culminates in a guilty verdict, but not before the children witness the harmful consequences of prejudice and learn through their father's noble efforts the value of integrity. Bosley Crowther lauded the film's "feeling for children." In the New York Times Crowther wrote: "There is … so much delightful observation of their spirit, energy, and charm…. Especially in their relations with their father."

Following the success of To Kill a Mockingbird, Foote wrote such screenplays as Baby, the Rain Must Fall, Hurry Sundown, and an adaptation of Faulkner's Tomorrow. But he withdrew into semi-retirement during the 1970s to live on a farm in New Hampshire with his family. There he concentrated upon playwriting, producing his acclaimed "Orphans' Home" cycle, based upon his father's childhood and coming of age. Foote's reemergence in Hollywood came at the suggestion of a friend, actor Robert Duvall, who requested a screenplay from the writer. The result was Tender Mercies, the 1983 movie that won Foote a second Academy Award for best screenplay and Duvall an Oscar for best actor.

The film portrays a famous country singer who succumbs to alcoholism and loses his career and marriage. Eventually he finds solace with a young widow and her son in a Texas roadside motel. True to Foote's enduring, subtle style, "the excitement of Tender Mercies lies below the surface," wrote David Sterritt in the Saturday Evening Post. "It's not the quick change of fast action, the flashy performances or the eye-zapping cuts. Rather, it's something much more rare—the thrill of watching characters grow, personalities deepen, relationships ripen and mature. It's the pleasure of rediscovering the dramatic richness of decency, honesty, compassion and a few other qualities that have become rare visitors to the silver screen." Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that Foote's screenplay "doesn't overexplain or overanalyze. It has a rare appreciation for understatement, which is the style of its characters if not of the actual narrative." Canby called Tender Mercies "the best thing [Foote's] ever done for films."

Even before his successful return to the screen, Foote had begun work on a nine-part dramatic cycle called "Orphans' Home." The cycle follows several generations of the Robedaux family and depicts their hardships amid the decline of the plantation aristocracy in southern Texas during the early part of the twentieth century. The character who unites the cycle is Horace Robedaux, a boy abandoned by his mother after the death of his father. How Horace persists in the face of tragedy forms the crux of each play. In 1918, for example, Horace and his fellow small-town Texans follow the news of World War I even as a deadly influenza outbreak brings mounting casualties to their own world. Lily Dale explores Horace's attempt to connect with the mother and sister who left him behind for a better life in Houston. The concluding play in the cycle, The Death of Papa, reveals a family's disintegration after Horace's grandfather dies. Foote is quoted in the Southern Literary Journal as having written of the cycle: "These plays, I feel, are about change, unexpected, unasked for, unwanted, but to be faced and dealt with or else we sink into despair or a hopeless longing for a life that is gone."

Critical response to the series, which included the televised productions 1918, On Valentine's Day, and Convicts, has been divided between opponents and proponents of Foote's typically subdued style. Writing in the National Review, Chilton Williamson, Jr. thought Foote "trivializes life into a banal serenity," while Canby argued that Foote's characters, "being so resolutely ordinary, become particular." Canby called 1918 a "writer's movie…. One that, for better or worse, pays no attention to the demands for pacing and narrative emphasis that any commercially oriented Hollywood producer would have insisted on. The very flatness of its dramatic line is its dramatic point." Author Reynolds Price is quoted in Christian Century as saying that the "Orphans' Home" cycle "will take its rightful place near the center of our largest American dramatic achievements."

Foote continued to write through his eighties, producing new plays and directing plays by his daughter, Daisy. In 1995 he earned a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Young Man from Atlanta. Set in the 1950s, The Young Man from Atlanta follows the struggles of Will and Lily Dale Kidder as they seek to reconcile themselves to their son's death, a possible suicide. A young man claiming to have been the son's roommate accepts huge sums of money from Lily Dale in exchange for information, but Will staunchly refuses to see him. Although the son's homosexuality is implied—and his roommate's integrity is challenged by a third party—neither question is fully resolved during the drama. In a review for Advocate, Dick Scanlan declared: "At 81, Foote's artistic heart remains in good shape, his instinct for truth intact. Young Man addresses the futile pursuit of the American dream a la Death of a Salesman while adding heterosexuality as a component of that dream." Variety correspondent Greg Evans felt that the play's "affecting portrait of shattered illusions … won't soon be forgotten."

The Last of the Thorntons, produced in New York in 2000, is set in a nursing home. There the elderly residents and their visitors, all of whom hail from the same small Texas town, review their lives both past and present with varying degrees of resignation. "As befits an 84-year-old playwright, this small but haunting work is about final endings and the ghosts of the past," maintained Karl Levett in Back Stage. "It is presented in a straightforward, slice-of-life fashion, but with echoing reverberations way beyond the here and now. With complete mastery over his material, Foote achieves his effects with never a false note, making it all seem deceptively simple." In Variety, Charles Isherwood described the play as "a piece of chamber music more than a drama. It makes the kind of quiet inroads into our hearts that music does. By the end you're surprised at how deeply—and almost imperceptibly—you've been affected, how impatience has quietly turned into empathy."

Foote has also authored two autobiographies, Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood and Beginnings. Together the two books take Foote from birth to his years as an actor and budding playwright. Andrew O'Hehir noted in the New York Times Book Review that, at first, Farewell seems like "nostalgic musings for a bygone era of small-town America." The critic added, however, that the work "provides a key to the birth of [Foote's] distinctive sensibility." Wilson Quarterly reviewer Larry L. King commended Foote for writing Farewell "deliberately, in detail, and unhurriedly." King added: "In time, one realizes that his wanderings are not without purpose, and that he has achieved a surprising economy of words." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote of Beginnings: "Foote's chronicle is still as charming as his plays and will be welcomed by his fans."

Marion Castleberry, in conjunction with Foote, has edited Genesis of an American Playwright, which collects previously published essays and includes a chronology of Foote's life as well as an appendix listing cast and details of all plays, screenplays, and teleplays. Genesis "reveals both the private man and the prolific artist," Joanne Brannon Aldridge writing for the Charlotte Observer reported and "Foote's comments are rich and generous." Castleberry has been instrumental in creating the Horton Foote American Playwrights Festival and the Horton Foote Society at Baylor University.

Some years ago, Foote moved back to his hometown to reside in the family homestead, although he also kept an apartment in Greenwich Village. In the New York Times Magazine, Samuel G. Freedman reflected on the Texan's distinctive style: "The key to Foote's writing, the signature of his style, is the ability to convey both melodramatic events and loquacious language in a spare, reductive manner. While his plots suggest Faulkner, his style shares more with Katharine Anne Porter, and he is influenced primarily by poetry, the most skeletal of forms."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Briley, Rebecca Luttrell, You Can Go Home Again: The Focus on Family in the Works of Horton Foote, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1993.

Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 51, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Contemporary Southern Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television, Volume 15 Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 26: American Screenwriters, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Foote, Horton, Beginnings: A Memoir, Scribner (New York, NY), 2001.

Foote, Horton, Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood, Scribner (New York, NY), 1999.

Porter, Laurin, Orphans' Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2003.

Prunty, Wyatt, editor, Sewanee Writers on Writing, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2000.

Watson, Charles S., Horton Foote: A Literary Biography,University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 2003.

Wood, Gerald C., Horton Foote and the Theater of Intimacy, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, April 29, 1997, Dick Scanlan, review of The Young Man from Atlanta, p. 61.

America, May 10, 1986.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 25, 1999, Dan Hul-bert, review of Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood, p. S10.

Back Stage, December 8, 2000, Karl Levett, review of The Last of the Thorntons, p. 56.

Booklist, February 15, 1999, Jack Helbig, review of Getting Frankie Married—and Afterwards and Other Plays, p. 1027; May 1, 1999, Jack Helbig, review of Farewell, p. 1572.

Charlotte Observer, Joanne Brannon Aldridge, review of GenesisFri, Jul. 23, 2004.

Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1985; February 7, 1986; January 8, 1987.

Christian Century, February 19, 1997, James M. Wall, "Home, Family, Religion," p. 179.

Commonweal, March 16, 1956; February 26, 1988, p. 110.

Explicator, winter, 1998, Ron Evans, "Faulkner's 'Tomorrow,'" p. 95.

Houston Chronicle, February 18, 1996, Everett Evans, "A Stage of Life," p. 8.

Library Journal, April 1, 1989, p. 89; May 1, 1999, Barry X. Miller, review of Farewell, p. 80.

Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1983; April 3, 1983; April 3, 1984; April 17, 1984; June 12, 1985; December 23, 1985; March 15, 1986; December 13, 1987; June 8, 1996, Robert Koehler, "'Lily Dale' Withers in Face of Conflict," p. 6.

Modern Maturity, December, 1996, Sheila Benson, interview with Foote.

National Review, June 14, 1985; June 6, 1986.

New Leader, March 24, 1997, Stefan Kanfer, review of The Young Man from Atlanta, p. 22.

New Republic, March 31, 1986.

Newsday, November 21, 1986.

New York, May 26, 1986; January 5, 1987; April 6, 1987.

New Yorker, December 29, 1986; April 14, 1997, John Lahr, review of The Young Man from Atlanta, p. 86; September 10, 2001, John Lahr, "Texas Bittersweet," p. 102.

New York Herald Tribune Book Review, February 6, 1956.

New York Magazine, April 6, 1992, p. 87.

New York Times, April 30, 1941; January 8, 1942; December 7, 1942; April 5, 1944; April 16, 1952; November 4, 1953; October 28, 1954; February 19, 1956; April 12, 1982; February 8, 1983; March 4, 1983; March 13, 1983; April 21, 1985; April 26, 1985; April 28, 1985; May 27, 1985; December 20, 1985; April 11, 1986; April 13, 1986; May 4, 1986; May 13, 1986; August 15, 1986; October 8, 1986; October 17, 1986; November 21, 1986; December 18, 1986; April 5, 1987; December 2, 1989; December 3, 1989; December 4, 2000, Ben Brantley, "Wry Smiles Temper the Anguish of Old Age," p. B1; December 10, 2001, Mel Gussow, "The Creativity Born of a Town in Texas," p. E4.

New York Times Book Review, August 15, 1999, Andrew O'Hehir, review of Farewell, p. 18; December 30, 2001, N. Graham Nesmith, review of Beginnings, p. 17.

New York Times Magazine, February 9, 1986.

North American Review, March-April, 1996, Robert L. King, review of The Young Man from Atlanta, p. 44.

Publishers Weekly, December 13, 1993, p. 67; May 10, 1999, review of Farewell, p. 50; September 10, 2001, review of Beginnings, p. 71.

San Francisco Chronicle, February 26, 1956.

Saturday Evening Post, October, 1983.

Saturday Review, February 18, 1956.

Southern Literary Journal, fall, 1999, Michael Gallagher, "Horton Foote: Defying Heraclitus in Texas," p. 77.

Texas Monthly, July 1991, p. 110.

Time, April 14, 1986.

TV Guide, April 4, 1987.

Variety, March 31, 1997, Greg Evans, review of The Young Man from Atlanta, p. 98; June 29, 1998, Chris Jones, review of Vernon Early, p. 49; June 7, 1999, Markland Taylor, review of The Death of Papa, p. 47; December 11, 2000, Charles Isher-wood, review of The Last of the Thorntons, p. 29; August 20, 2001, Peter Ritter, review of The Carpetbagger's Children, p. 31.

Washington Post, February 8, 1983; April 29, 1983; January 31, 1985; April 25, 1986; June 9, 1996, Linton Weeks, "A Pale 'Lily Dale,'" p. G5.

Wilson Quarterly, autumn, 1999, Larry L. King, review of Farewell, p. 116.

ONLINE

Horton Foote Society Web site, http://www3.baylor.edu/Horton_Foote_Society/ (August 3, 2004).