Beschrijving
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: \
