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.

Offers a general study of Williams's major work, with particular emphasis placed on the structure of the poem. Deals specifically with William's concept of the city, and also evaluates the poem in terms of epic tradition.

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.

THE STORY: The Robedaux family has been divided by the exigencies of an unhappy fate. Julie Robedaux has moved back to her family's house with the children, Horace, Jr. and Beth Ruth, and has enlisted the help of her sister, Callie, in trying to op

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."

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.

There is a common hope for a richer, deeper life that connects a person to their past, to the people around them, and to a transcendental source—sometimes referred to as God, or the Unconscious. Root Out of Dry Ground provides an exploration into Carl Jung's depth psychology as it is used to understand a person's growth, the development of spirituality and religion in the West, as well as ways to live outside of traditional cultural and religious structures. Root Out of Dry Ground is an autobiographical sketch of Peter Buhler's life in southern Manitoba and Alberta; it covers Mennonite history in Canada and in Europe, and offers a philosophical analysis of historical developments across both Western and Eastern cultures. The book utilizes the ideas of Carl Jung in order to analyze historical developments over thousands of years, with a particular emphasis on world religions and the cultures they gave birth to, and to better understand Christian language and theology. In the autobiographical sketch, there is also careful attention to Peter Buhler's family, with an affirming remembrance of his brothers and sisters, and their mother and father. Root Out of Dry Ground serves as a foundation for bringing people together in a meaningful way, where the ideas of great thinkers and artists can help guide discussions and explorations of reality particularly for those who have lost their religious practice but remain rooted in their religious language and story.

Besides To Kill A Mockingbird and The Trip To Bountiful, Foote has written a score of notable plays, teleplays, and films.