Horton Foote : A Casebook

Contains essays on a writer for theater, television, and film, who received two Academy Awards for his screenplays of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983). Section I establishes the biographical, theatrical, and critical contexts for his work, with essays on the influence of his E

This study is the first general critical introduction to the writing of Horton Foote, recipient of two Academy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. These original essays survey Foote''s career, his work for theater, television, and film, with analysis of Foote''s major themes and characteristic style in all three media. The casebook concludes with a list of Foote''s produced work, as well as a selective annotated bibliography of primary criticism on the playwright. This book demonstrates the influence of personal biography and Southern literature on Foote''s career. The essayists also investigate the writer''s contribution to American dramatic realism and independent filmmaking, emphasizing his experimentation with musical structure, dedramatization, and complex subtexts. Foote''s disarmingly simple stories, with their radically understated language, are explained in many articles as the product of the subtle influence of the psychological and religious views of the author.