Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood by Foote (English) Paperback Book

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The award-winning author of "The Trip to Bountiful" and "Tender Mercies" returns to his roots at the age of 82 to introduce the place and the people that influenced his path as a writer--and as a man. 11 photos.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

For more than five decades, Horton Foote, "the Chekhov of the small town," has chronicled the changes in American life -- both intimate and universal. His adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and his original screenplay Tender Mercies earned him Academy Awards. He received an Indie Award for Best Writer for The Trip to Bountiful and a Pulitzer Prize for The Young Man from Atlanta. In his plays and films, Foote has returned over and over again to Wharton, Texas, where he was born and where he lives, once again, in the house in which he grew up. Now for the first time, in Farewell, Foote turns to prose to tell his own story and the stories of the real people who have inspired his characters. His memoir is both a celebration of the immense importance of community and evidence that even a strong community cannot save a lost soul. Farewell is as deeply moving as the best of Foote's writing for film and theater, and a gorgeous testimony to his own faith in the human spirit.

Author Biography

Horton Foote has written and adapted dozens of plays and screenplays, including The Trip to Bountiful, The Young Man from Atlanta, Tender Mercies, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Foote has won Academy and Writers Guild awards, as well as the Pulitzer Prize. In 1996 he was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame, and in 1998, to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received the Academy's Gold Medal for Drama for his life's work.

Review

Harper Lee author of To Kill a Mockingbird Poignant, mirthful, eccentric and deeply loving, Horton Foote's people mirror the Depression years of the South when the small town was at its zenith. Here, as in many of his plays, he preserves for us a society which, with all its inequities, was a unique part of America. A beautiful work.Andrew O'Hehir The New York Times Book Review This warm, spare chronicle...provides a key to the birth of his distinctive sensibility.Barry X. Miller Library Journal Not surprisingly, Foote writes prose as beautifully as he crafts the dialog that has earned him Academy Awards for the screenplays of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies and a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Young Man from Atlanta....Foote's memoir is a loving and gentle recollection that every library will want.Dan Hulbert The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Intimate astonishments jump out -- like fish breaking the surface of a still, dark lake from Foote's quiet, warm, dignified narrative....If you are new to Foote, Farewell may prompt you to explore his distinguished body of work. When the 16-year-old Horton boards the bus for Dallas and acting school, and bids farewell to Wharton, you may find yourself impatient for another installment of his long and well-lived life.Jack Helbig Booklist His tales, most of them set in the Texas of his childhood, unfold with the slow, easy grace of a flower opening to the sun....But by the end of the all-too-brief, beautifully written volume, Foote's relations feel like our family, and Foote's memories of life in the segregated South before and during the Great Depression seem more vivid than any of our own.Lynna Williams Chicago Tribune Farewell honors...the specificity of time and place....Along the way, he makes us believe in the past.Reynolds Price author of Roxanna Slade In Farewell, Horton Foote turns to the actual people and events that lie behind so many of his plays -- the apparently peaceful but land-mined surroundings of his childhood in Texas. The whole account is rich in Foote's most striking skills -- the brisk clarity of his memory and the uncanny ability of his plain language to summon the urgent human complexities.

Long Description

For more than five decades, Horton Foote, "the Chekhov of the small town," has chronicled the changes in American life -- both intimate and universal. His adaptation of Harper Lee'sTo Kill a Mockingbirdand his original screenplayTender Merciesearned him Academy Awards. He received an Indie Award for Best Writer forThe Trip to Bountifuland a Pulitzer Prize forThe Young Man from Atlanta.In his plays and films, Foote has returned over and over again to Wharton, Texas, where he was born and where he lives, once again, in the house in which he grew up. Now for the first time, inFarewell,Foote turns to prose to tell his own story and the stories of the real people who have inspired his characters. His memoir is both a celebration of the immense importance of community and evidence that even a strong community cannot save a lost soul.Farewellis as deeply moving as the best of Foote's writing for film and theater, and a gorgeous testimony to his own faith in the human spirit.

Review Quote

Reynolds Priceauthor ofRoxanna SladeInFarewell,Horton Foote turns to the actual people and events that lie behind so many of his plays -- the apparently peaceful but land-mined surroundings of his childhood in Texas. The whole account is rich in Foote's most striking skills -- the brisk clarity of his memory and the uncanny ability of his plain language to summon the urgent human complexities.

Excerpt from Book

Chapter One I left my home in Wharton at sixteen, but no matter how poor I was, and I was often very poor, I always managed to return for a visit at least once a year, and whenever I met with friends or relatives on those visits we inevitably got around to: "Do you remember when," or "I wonder whatever happened to ..." I was the first grandchild born into the extended family that surrounded me in Wharton and Houston. On my father''s side I had a grandmother, a stepgrandfather, an aunt, three great-aunts, a great-uncle, a great-great-uncle and first, second and third cousins in abundance. On my mother''s side I had a grandfather, grandmother, two aunts, three uncles, three great-uncles, four great-aunts and many first, second and third cousins. Also, nearer the coast in the towns of East Columbia and Angleton were other great-aunts and cousins. I was fond of all of them, and particularly close to my mother''s mother and father, her younger sisters and her brothers. The backyards of our houses joined and we were always, it seemed to me, visiting each other. Whenever my mother and her sisters got together, sooner or later, one of them would ask: "I wonder why the boys [meaning their brothers] are like they are?" As the years went on the questions were somewhat rephrased, and became more concerned and urgent, because by then the boys, now grown men, had begun in earnest their wasted, tragic lives. Wasted tragic lives, I had by twelve observed, seemed nearly always to occur to at least one male member of the families we knew, but to have the only three sons of a family turn out so was most unusual. The town, too, seemed to realize how unusual it was, and for many years seemed as obsessed with that question as we were. For my family learned from well-meaning friends that it was out of our hearing a much discussed topic, and to our faces, from time to time, each of us was asked the question, put in a studied, casual, offhand way, "What has happened to the Brooks boys?" or "Where are the Brooks boys now?" or "Do you stay in touch with the Brooks boys?" I seldom hear that question now, because my father and mother and her immediate family are all dead and except for two cousins that live in Houston, anyone else related to the boys (as we continued calling them even when two of them lived to their early sixties) are dead, too, as well as any friends that knew them. When I visit with the cousin from Houston who remembers them as vividly as I do, we will still at some point ask once again, "I wonder why the boys turned out the way they did?" Fifteen, or ten years ago, even, a number of people living in Wharton would have known them, or heard of them through their parents. They would have known, too, that the handsome, stately house on Richmond Road, now visibly neglected, with the huge cypress tree shading the front gallery, and the fruit market and general store to one side of its front yard, had once been owned by the Brookses, and was still called the Brooks house, although it had been owned for fifty years by another family, the owners of the fruit market and the general store. I thought of the Brooks boys recently when I was sent a picture taken in 1928 of my eighth-grade class. I remember well all but four of my classmates pictured there, know in some measure what happened to those I remember and realize that none of them that are living any longer live in Wharton so that even if I wanted to ask again what happened to so-and-so, or do you remember when -- there is no one in town I could ask these questions, or no one to ask me about the Brooks boys. I was the youngest in my class and in the picture almost every girl is at least a head taller. It occurred to me that this slight young fellow (still eleven years old -- twelve in March) had already decided he wanted to be an actor, although it was still only a secret wish confided to few people. I had told my mother and father and overheard them one night on their front gallery -- my father always called it the gallery, my mother usually referred to it as a porch -- discussing this desire, "notion," they called it, and reassuring themselves that I would grow out of it. I didn''t. Indeed the determination grew stronger each year thereafter, so that when I graduated from high school, at sixteen, I refused to even consider going to college and insisted that my Depression-burdened parents send me to New York to a dramatic school, which they did, though first insisting that I wait a year to be sure it was still what I wanted to do, and then substituting Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California, for New York, "You are too young to be turned loose in New York, Son." The only plays I''d seen were those performed by the Dude Arthur Comedians, a tent show that came to our town once a year for a week, Florence Reed in a stock company production of The Shanghai Gesture in Houston, Vilma Banky and Rod La Roque (two film stars whose careers had been ruined by the advent of talking pictures) in a touring production of Cherries Are Ripe, also in Houston. Then, too, there was the Wharton Little Theatre, formed when I was a freshman in high school, and where I saw productions of Coquette, The Silver Cord, Sun Up, Enter Madame, George Kelly''s The Torch-Bearers and a melodrama, Gold in Them Thar Hills. When I was a sophomore, Eppie Murphree, just graduated from college, came to Wharton to teach speech and put on plays in high school. I found a way to tell her my ambition to be an actor, and, to my relief, she took it very seriously. She cast me that spring in a one-act play, about three college roommates, one of them having a serious drug problem. I was cast as the young addict. I knew a lady in town that I was told was addicted to paregoric, but that was the extent of my knowledge of drug use. However I got my ideas for the behavior of this young man (there is a scene in which he confesses to his unsuspecting roommates that he is an addict and has a kind of fit before them, since he needs a fix and he has no money for drugs), it must have had some effect, for when the performance was over the judge called Eppie aside and asked, "Is that Foote boy afflicted or is that acting?" She assured them it was acting and they gave me first prize for best actor. Eppie saw to it that I was cast in all the plays she did in my sophomore, junior and senior years, none of them memorable, but they kept me acting. Where did all this start? I remember walking in summer evenings, with my parents and my brothers, the smell of honeysuckle everywhere, and we would often pass a small Victorian cottage, on whose porch a distinguished white-haired gentleman would be seated. He and my parents always exchanged greetings and once after we were a few yards away my father said, "That''s Mr. Armstrong and he was in the cotton fields of Mississippi when he got a call to come to Texas and preach." "What does that mean, Daddy?" I asked. "What does what mean, Son?" "Getting a call." "He''s a Baptist, Son," he said as if that explained everything. "Is that why he got a call, because he''s a Baptist?" "Well, now ..." "Can only Baptists get a call?" "No, honey," my mother ever patient said. "Methodists can, too, and Presbyterians and Episcopalians." "What about Holy Rollers?" I asked. "I expect they can, too, darling," Mother said. "I just don''t happen to know any." "Why do they call them Holy Rollers?" I asked. "I don''t know, precious. Do you, hon?" she asked my father. "No, sweetheart, I don''t; preachers have a hard life," he added as if to discourage any of his sons from the notion of getting that kind of call. "Do Holy Rollers have preachers?" I continued asking. "I wouldn''t know, sweetheart. I''m sure they do," my mother said. "Maybe they roll around, and that''s why they are called Holy Rollers." "Maybe so, honey." When I was eleven, I got a call, so to speak, not to be a preacher, but an actor. It came to me as clearly as I presume Mr. Armstrong''s call came to him that acting was what I wanted to do. And I never wavered from that call either until I began writing, some ten years later, and the desire to act left me as suddenly as it had arrived. Copyright

Details ISBN068486570X Short Title FAREWELL Pages 288 Language English ISBN-10 068486570X ISBN-13 9780684865706 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY B Year 2000 Imprint Simon & Schuster Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Subtitle A Memoir of a Texas Childhood DOI 10.1604/9780684865706 UK Release Date 2000-06-05 NZ Release Date 2000-06-05 Author Foote Publisher Simon & Schuster Illustrations 1, black & white illustrations Audience General AU Release Date 2000-07-14 Publication Date 2000-06-05 US Release Date 2000-06-05 We've got this

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