Horton Foote

Horton Foote (born March 14, 1916, Wharton, Texas, U.S.—died March 4, 2009, Hartford, Connecticut) was an American playwright and screenwriter who evoked American life in beautifully observed minimal stories and was perhaps best known for his adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Foote studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse in California and in New York City. His first two plays, Wharton Dance (1940) and Texas Town (1941), were staged by the American Actors’ Company in New York City. Foote’s best-known original work, The Trip to Bountiful, was written as a television play and broadcast in 1953; later that year it was staged on Broadway, and in 1985 it was produced as a film, for which Foote also wrote the Academy Award-nominated screenplay. His 1954 play The Travelling Lady, with his screenplay, became the film Baby, the Rain Must Fall in 1965. Foote also wrote an acclaimed series of nine plays about rural Texas, The Orphans’ Home Cycle; these include Valentine’s Day (1980), 1918 (1982), and The Widow Claire (1986). His low-key but insightful play The Young Man from Atlanta (1994) won the Pulitzer Prize.

Foote won Academy Awards for his screenplays for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), which was adapted from the novel by Harper Lee, and Tender Mercies (1983). His other notable scripts include Of Mice and Men (1992), an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name, and Old Man (1997), a made-for-television movie based on The Wild Palms by William Faulkner.

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