Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood - Hardcover

Foote, Horton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684844397 ISBN 13: 9780684844398

Publisher: Scribner, 1999

Synopsis

An Academy Award-winning screenwriter and playwright presents a memoir of his family and the small much-loved Texas town he grew up in, exquisitely capturing the problems, delights, and everyday life of another time. 35,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

Review

The marvelous second chapter of Farewell sets the mood for everything to come in the noted playwright's memoir of his childhood in tiny Wharton, Texas. As a young Horton Foote questions his parents about their "elopement"--they had to go five blocks across town to be wed by a Baptist minister because his mother's Methodist parents didn't approve of the match--the intricate web of kinship, friendship, and local geography that shapes small-town life is hilariously yet touchingly revealed in each of their asides and elaborations. Foote's birth in 1916 healed the family rift, and he grew up in a cozy environment where everyone knew everyone else and more or less accepted their eccentricities. He doesn't gloss over the harsh realities of racial prejudice and segregation, but his tone is nonetheless elegiac, glowing with the magic of the characters' storytelling. Southerners have always been famous for their ability to spin yarns, and Foote captures that in extended passages of conversation. Direct quotes are generally cause for suspicion in a memoir, but when the dialogue has the same vigor and subtlety found in the author's screenplays and plays (A Trip to Bountiful and The Young Man from Atlanta among them), you're willing to give Foote the benefit of the doubt. --Wendy Smith

About the Author

Horton Foote has written and adapted dozens of plays and screenplays, including The Trip to Bountiful, The Orphans' Home Cycle, The Young Man from Atlanta, Tender Mercies, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The Death of Papa is being staged at the Hartford Theater in the spring of 1999. Foote has won Academy and Writers Guild awards, as well as the Pulitzer Prize. He recently was honored for his body of work at the Telluride Film Festival, and received the Writers Guild's Ian McLellan Hunter Award for lifetime achievement in writing. In 1996 he was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame, and in 1998, to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member in the Department of Literature. He also received the Academy's Gold Medal for Drama for his life's work.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684844397
• ISBN 13: 9780684844398
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288