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.

Reviews

Though he later earned the moniker "Chekhov of the small town" for his portrayals of ordinary lives, Foote never heard of the Russian master until he went to California at 17 to study acting. In fact, despite a bookish childhood (the precocious Foote joined the Literary Guild and the Book of the Month Club at age 12), the playwright and screenwriter who won Oscars for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies set out to act rather than write. His eventual change of path is beyond the territory of this genteel, unreflective childhood memoir, but clearly Foote's upbringing in small-town Wharton, Tex., in the 1920s had much to do with it. A backwater short on economic opportunities but disproportionately rich in colorful characters and tragic stories, WhartonÄand Foote's extended family of storytellers, gossips and ne'er-do-well unclesÄprovided abundant inspiration. While Wharton exhibited reflexive racism and dust-bowl poverty, Foote's family was progressive and prosperous. Former slaveholders, they rejected the most virulent Southern traditions for kindly paternalism: Foote tells of finding KKK robes stashed in a cupboard and learning that his grandfather attended one meeting out of a sense of very localized civic duty before resigning in disgust. Foote rarely moralizes or comments on how this, or anything for that matter, shaped him, instead relying on the dramatist's tool of dialogue to capture the textures of daily life. The book is so unreflective that it reads more like family history than memoir, frequently bogging down in perfunctory, dutiful tracings of every tangled limb of the ancestral tree. By far the most vivid character is Wharton, where every house and vacant lot, every storefront and street corner has a complex history. (June)

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.

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 (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983) and a Pulitzer Prize for his play Young Man from Atlanta (Dutton, 1996). The celebrated octogenarian now movingly recalls his small-town Texas childhood, from his birth in 1916 to his departure for a theatrical education at the Pasadena Playhouse 17 years later. Along the way, Foote runs through reminiscences, stories, and yarns the way prunes run through a widow-woman. The townsfolk of Wharton, its eccentrics, and especially the extended Brooks family with its attendant quirks, secrets, and wastrel uncles are very simply conjured and, like the lower Colorado River on whose east bank the town is situated, flow continuously through the lazy arc of the narrative. Filled with tales of segregation, the river, cotton, and the Depression, Foote's memoir is a loving and gentle recollection that every library will want.ÄBarry X. Miller, Austin P.L. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.