Horton Foote
Horton Foote
Albert Horton Foote, Jr.was an American playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, and his notable live television dramas during the Golden Age of Television. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1995 for his play The Young Man From Atlanta and two Academy Awards, one for an original screenplay, Tender Mercies, and one for adapted screenplay, To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1995,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth14 March 1916
CountryUnited States of America
But I don't really write to honor the past. I write to investigate, to try to figure out what happened and why it happened, knowing I'll never really know. I think all the writers that I admire have this same desire, the desire to bring order out of chaos.
If I ever teach writing again, I’d say the first lesson is to listen.
I come out of a strong oral tradition in the South,
Writing is the thing that props me up.
When you're a writer, you have to write these stories, even if you don't get paid
Early on, I said to myself that I would like to write a kind of moral and spiritual history of a place. It sounds a little pretentious, I know. But that's really what I set for myself.
I've redone plays of mine and made changes. A play is a living thing, and I'd never say I wouldn't rewrite years later. Tennessee Williams did that all the time, and it's distressing, because I'd like the play to be out there in its finished form.
My first memory was of stories about the past - a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It didn't take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone, and nothing could be done about it.
My mother, twenty-two, was Harriet Gautier Brooks, named for her paternal grandmother, but always called Hallie. My father, twenty-six, was Albert Horton Foote, named for his father and great-grandfather, and I was named Albert Horton Foote, Jr.