Beginnings: A Memoir - Softcover

Foote, Horton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743211162 ISBN 13: 9780743211161

Publisher: Scribner, 2002

Synopsis

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Horton Foote has chronicled the experiences of American life in both his internationally acclaimed plays and his Academy Award-winning screenplays To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies. Now, in this poignant and delightful memoir, he tells the story of how he discovered his own vocation.
Horton Foote recalls his youthful aspirations, leaving his Depression-era Texas home to become an actor at age sixteen. He lands in New York City to search for work -- and to study with some of the great Russian and American drama teachers of the 1930s. But after mixed results on the stage, he finally recognizes his true passion: the written word.
Collaborating with such legendary talents as Tennessee Williams, Agnes de Mille, and Lillian Gish, Foote thrived in a world of artistic commitment and creative passion. Yet through it all, Horton maintained his genuine Southern charm, often returning home to Wharton, the town that nurtured and inspired him as a storyteller.
From one of the most moving and distinctive voices of our time, Beginnings is a rare, personal look at a fascinating era in American life and at the making of an American literary icon.

About this title

Review

Playwright Horton Foote's first memoir, Farewell, was saturated in the larger-than-life characters and outsized storytelling of his native Texas. Though Beginnings, his second, lacks panhandle panache, drama lovers will relish Foote's close encounters with many of the most significant names in the American theater during the 1930s and '40s. He studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse and with expatriate members of the Moscow Art Theater. He attended the opening night of The Glass Menagerie as the guest of Tennessee Williams, with whom he exchanged letters and writing tips in the early 1940s, when Foote was working on such early plays as Texas Town. Readers will enjoy Foote's descriptions of an aunt and uncle who mysteriously fail to collect him for Thanksgiving one year in Southern California ("My sister Bo thinks Walt got on a drunk just before Thanksgiving and Mag went off to her children without him," surmises Baboo, his grandmother), and of his appendicitis attack back in Wharton, Texas, where three uncles "not worth killing" made Baboo's life miserable. Foote's description of his forlorn first Christmas and New Year's in New York City in 1935-36 is almost unbearably sad. Thank goodness he meets and marries a wonderful woman, and his plays begin to be produced and favorably reviewed. In prose as unadorned and evocative as his dialogue, Foote adds something fresh to our understanding of the artist as a young man. --Wendy Smith

About the Author

Horton Foote, born in Wharton, Texas, in 1916, has written and adapted over fifty plays and screenplays, including The Trip to Bountiful, The Young Man from Atlanta, Tender Mercies, and To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1996 he was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame, and in 1998, to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, from which he received the Gold Medal for Drama for his life's work. Foote has won two Oscars, a Pulitzer Prize, Writers Guild awards, and the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama, and was most recently awarded the president's National Medal of Arts from former President Bill Clinton.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743211162
• ISBN 13: 9780743211161
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272