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America's Storyteller
Free Press
September 2009
On Sale: September 8, 2009
304 pages
ISBN: 1416566406
EAN: 9781416566403
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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