Horton Foote life and biography

Albert Horton Foote, Jr. was an American playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning 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.

Horton Foote won two screenwriting Oscars, one for the film version of Harper Lee's novel To Kill A Mockingbird (1961, starring Gregory Peck) and one for Tender Mercies (1983, starring Robert Duvall). Born and raised in the small Texas town of Wharton, Foote set out for California after high school to make his mark as an actor. By the 1940s he was in New York and found he was more suited to writing plays, which in turn led to a career writing screenplays for movies and, later, television. During his long and celebrated career he specialized in the quiet dramas of rural Americans, setting most of his work in the fictional town of Harris, Texas. He earned a third Oscar nomination for adapting his play The Trip to Bountiful (1985), and he also did critically-acclaimed screen adaptations of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (the 1992 film version that starred John Malkovich and Gary Sinise) and William Faulkner's Old Man (a 1997 TV movie that won Foote an Emmy).

His play The Young Man From Atlanta earned him a Pulitzer prize for drama in 1995, and in 2000 he was given a National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton.

Plays:

Wharton Dance (1940)
Texas Town (1941)
Only the Heart (1942)
Out of My House (1942)
Two Southern Idylls: Miss Lou / The Girls (1943)
The Lonely (1944)
Goodbye to Richmond (1944)
Daisy Lee (one-act) (1944)
Homecoming (1944)
In My Beginning (1944)
People in the Show (1944)
Return (1944)
Celebration (1950)
The Chase (1952)
The Traveling Lady (1954)
The Dancers (1954)
John Turner Davis (1956)
The Midnight Caller (1956)
The Trip to Bountiful (1962)
Roots in a Parched Ground (Orphans' Home cycle) (1962)
Tomorrow (1968)
Gone with the Wind (Author of book) (1972)
A Young Lady of Property (1976)
Night Seasons (1977)
Courtship (Orphans' Home cycle) (1987)
1918 (Orphans' Home cycle) (1979) In a Coffin in Egypt (1980)
Valentine's Day (1980)
The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees (1981)
The Old Friends (1982)
The Roads to Home: Nightingale / The Dearest of Friends / Spring Dance (1982)
The Land of the Astronauts (1983)
Cousins (Orphans' Home cycle) (1983)
The Road to the Graveyard (one-act) (1985)
Courtship/Valentine's Day (Orphans' Home cycle) (1985)
One Armed Man (1985)
The Prisoner's Song (1985)
Blind Date (one-act) (1985)
Convicts (Orphans' Home cycle) (1986)
The Widow Claire (Orphans' Home cycle) (1986)
Lily Dale (Orphans' Home cycle) (1986)
The Habitation of Dragons (1988)
The Death of Papa (Orphans' Home cycle) (1999)
Dividing the Estate (1989)
Talking Pictures (1990)
Laura Dennis (1995)
The Young Man From Atlanta (1995)
The Day Emily Married (1996)
Vernon Early (1998)
The Last of the Thorntons (2000)
The Carpetbagger's Children (2001)
Dividing the Estate (2008)

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